Rassistische Gewalt im Süden der USA: 1865 bis 1920

Abstract

Nach Jahrzehnten intensiver Forschung zum Phänomen des Lynchings, seinen Ursachen und den Formen des politischen Widerstands gegen rassistische Gewalt in den USA, stehen die beteiligten Disziplinen Soziologie und Geschichtswissenschaft vor dem ungelösten Problem einer Erklärung von Lynchmorden. Die Theoriebildung krankt an monokausalen Erklärungsansätzen. Der Artikel geht den verschiedenen Ansätzen nach und fordert eine multiperspektivische Erforschung rassistischer Gewalt ein.

After decades of intensive research on lynching in the US South, its causes, and its cultural context by historians, criminologists, sociologists, and political scientists, the scholars within these disciplines still lack a convincing causal explanation of the phenomenon and its virtual disappearance after 1960. This article, initially given as the author's commencement speech (Antrittsvorlesung) at the University of Hamburg, discusses the various scholarly approaches to the historiography of racist violence in the United States extensively. lt becomes obvious that the theoretical conceptualization and the methodological reflection, necessary for a framework of historical, criminologist and sociological research in lynching, are too often led by narrow monocausal categories. Tue article argues for a multiperspective approach to a theory of racist violence in America and its contextualization within a social history of post-Civil War Reconstruction.