Iconoclasms of Emmett Till and his killers in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle: A new generation of historiographic metafiction

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that the apparent historical inaccuracies contained within Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle (Nordan, Lewis. 2003 [1993]. Wolf Whistle. Chapel Hill: Algonquin) represent a systematic repeal of the controversial history surrounding the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. Nordan reconstitutes the principle characters to function as iconoclasms of the historical record. As iconoclasms, these representations undermine our culture’s accepted model of history, what Hayden White terms the “historical account” (White, Hayden. 1975. Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press: 30).