Landscape paintings can make racial terror legible through screened absence rather than depiction

Evidence

Each of the landscape paintings from “Within Our Gates” focuses on a different lynching site: these are lynching sites without ropes or mobs or dangling, mutilated men in them. The tree-lined rural and suburban scenes that Washington represents have no people in them, but beneath each bucolic painting, he has inscribed the name of the lynched man and the location. No date is given: the effect is of a violence that feels open ended, ongoing in its deep yet incomplete specificity. The paintings feel eerily becalmed: this is domestic terrorism domesticated by pastoral convention; by national amnesia; and by the overgrowths of time, vegetation, and rezoning. From these preternaturally ordinary trees hang amnesia’s strange fruit. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 770

Categorization

• SEED: Washington’s method — beautiful nature scenes captioned with a lynched man’s name, no date — is an outstanding device for rendering slow, ongoing violence: an aesthetic model for the polyad’s visibility task.
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘strange fruit’ hanging from amnesia’s trees, where terror is domesticated by pastoral convention and overgrowth, transforms a nature-scene technique into a full theory of how forgetting is spatial and vegetal.
• XREF: connects to: Landscape painting retroactively reveals nature and society as ideological representations — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 394; Depicting ecological harm through silenced absence makes invisible slow violence sensually present — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 172; Cinema builds the imaginative space of the racialized other through light-dark binaries — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 680

Broader Connections

• Depicting ecological harm through silenced absence makes invisible slow violence sensually present #corroborates (0.85) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 172
• Landscape painting retroactively reveals nature and society as ideological representations #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 394
• Cinema builds the imaginative space of the racialized other through light-dark binaries #expands (0.75) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 680