Searching for a Brown Commons: Racial Affect and Re-enactment in Ken Gonzales-Day's Lynching Projects

The author explores Ken Gonzales-Day's multi-modal works on Lynching in the West with regard to the racial affects and photographic effects of lynching photography. She argues that Gonzles-Day complicates the black/white binary associated with the affects of terror and shame with “browness,” as a strategy for redressing the historical erasure of the BIPOC victims of lynching in the West, for implicating the contemporary viewer in the scenario of lynching that structures racial violence to this day, and for mobilizing adjacency in pursuit of a commons among the human and more than human subjects harmed by the white nationalism of the US American settler state.

Keywords: a black gaze ; adjacency ; archive ; Latinidad ; melancholy ; photography ; scenario ; settler colonialism ; shame ; spectacle ; terror ; the implicated subject ; white nationalism ; white sight ; wonder