Emmett Till, Justice, and the Task of Recognition

This chapter examines how the political ideas that would come to shape the civil rights movement in America were fomented and sometimes nearly thwarted by focusing on the many visual encounters with the dead and disfigured body of Emmett Till—some in the flesh, some mediated by photography. The chapter analyzes how the decision of Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett Till's mother, to have an open-casket funeral for her son made possible the wide-scale circulation of photographs of his body. An examination of the courtroom in which Till's murderers were tried makes clear the paradoxical uses of his image. This use demonstrates that the political utility of seeing another's disfigured body lies in recognizing that the violence enacted upon the Other is also violence enacted upon the Self. The chapter offers a psychoanalytic and deconstructionist interpretation of recognition, which is figured as a central project in the struggle for black liberation and civil rights.