Srimayee Basu

Bio

Srimayee Basu is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. Her research areas include eighteenth- and nineteenth- century American Literature, Black Atlantic Studies, and Labor History. Her current book project, Punishment and Revolution, reads Anglophone Black Atlantic literature alongside penal history and the histories of slavery and abolition in the long nineteenth-century, and offers a new account of how extra-economic violence racialized New World labor. You can find her work in Nineteenth Century Studies, MELUS, and Modern Language Studies.

Contributions

The Aestheticization of Politics: The Case of Lynching Photographs

Peer Reviewed

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[Content note: this article contains graphic images of lynching.] For a work that is pivotal to scholarship on Jim Crow racial violence, the phrase “Jim Crow” is conspicuously absent in Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. Instead, she calls the epoch “nineteenth-century civilization,” a deceptively toothless choice of words until one begins to understand its full import.

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