Living with Lynching received a favorable review in the journal Legacy, alongside a book I very much admire, Crystal Feimster's Southern Horrors (Harvard UP). The reviewer, Jennie Lightweis-Goff, is author of Blood at the Root: Lynching As American Cultural Nucleus.
She begins by marking how dramatically scholarship on racial violence has proliferated since 2002. She notes, "However, despite the upsurge of scholarship on lynching, Koritha Mitchell's Living with Lynching suggests that the process of redress has scarcely begun. Mitchell begins her book with a bracing introduction that radically reimagines the relationship between scholarship on lynching and the photography of the dead.... " Also, "In addition to unearthing an underexplored archive of black women's writing, Mitchell engages with one of the central problematics of feminist and critical race theories: the ethics of representing atrocity."
Lightweis-Goff concludes, "Mitchell's alternative account of black communities and values and Feimster's counter-narratives about white and black women's responses to lynching are essential reading in a scholarly climate that provides a plethora of writing on collective violence"
For the full review, see Legacy 30.2 (2013): 417 - 20.
