Congratulations Koritha Mitchell

Living with LynchingKoritha Mitchell’s Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930, is the Society for the Study of American Women Writers 2012 Book Award Winner.

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Mitchell posits that lynching violence was a reaction to black success.

“[Mitchell] shows how performing lynching plays in community spaces allowed African Americans to actualize the various subjectivities . . . that lynchings sought to expunge. This book is required reading for understanding the ways in which narrative and performance have been central to challenging white oppression as well as (re)imagining black identity in America. Highly recommended.”–Choice

“An emphatic push to change how we understand, write about, and teach the phenomenon of lynching.”–H-SHGAPE

Koritha Mitchell is an associate professor of English at The Ohio State University, and is an active blogger and public speaker. Her work was highlighted last month on The Ohio State University English Department’s blog. Congratulations, Professor Mitchell!