"An Array of Facts": Anti-Lynching Literature and Bibliographic Control

Abstract: This article argues that a tradition of anti-lynching literature uses documentary techniques to exercise bibliographic control over lynching discourse. That tradition, inaugurated by Ida B. Wells, offers an alternative to the lurid narrative accounts published in newspapers and the quantitative statistical accounts produced by academics. In that way, anti-lynching literature resolves a tension between qualitative and quantitative methodologies. While quantitative methods risk abstracting the lives lost to racial violence, qualitative methods risk reproducing the spectacle of violence in the process of describing it. That impasse has marked the archival turn in Black studies as a problematic of representation. How can the archival records used to enslave, imprison, and impoverish Black people also be used to write the history of Black lives? Reading anti-lynching literature as an achievement of bibliographic control shows how critical information practices index the scope of racial violence without contributing to its erasures. Building on the archival turn, this article suggests how other information technologies besides the archive contribute to historical memory in ways that attest to the durability of Black life.