Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Baker, Courtney

Titel

Emmett Till, Justice, and the Task of Recognition

Ist Teil von

• Journal of American culture (Malden, Mass.), 2006-06, Vol.29 (2), p.111-124

Ort / Verlag

Malden, USA: Blackwell Publishing Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2006

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Wiley Online Library Journals Frontfile Complete

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The murder of the African American teenager Emmett Till in 1955 and the acquittal of his confessed murderers constitute watershed events in the American Civil Rights movement whose legacy continues into the present. Many people can vividly recall their first viewing of Till's postmortem picture, which shows a bloated and disfigured body lying in an open casket or on the coroner's slab, and cite it as a consciousness-altering moment in their lives. Here, Baker examines three major sites wherein Till's body was figured as a spectacle and analyzes how issues of distortion and misrecognition are negotiated in relation to an overarching notion of humanity.