Shaping Southern Memory

W. Fitzhugh Brundage. The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 2005. xiii + 418 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $27.95.

Possessing a strong regional self-consciousness, the American South provides an exceptionally rich proving ground for the notion that the past has currency. In recent years, a cottage industry in memory studies has tied identity, political culture, and power relations to how southerners have viewed history. In the 1980s, studies by Gaines Foster and Charles Reagan Wilson considered the Lost Cause as an important cultural moment; subsequent work by William Blair and Karen Cox reexamines the Lost Cause in light of considerations of race and gender, suggesting that southern memory was contested terrain. These studies, along with David Blight's Race and Reunion (2002), stress how memory of the American Civil War involved a larger struggle for cultural authority.¹ These works also illustrate a constant struggle over the past: those in control of memory also exert extraordinary authority. One might wonder what could be added to this already full literature—and whether it is possible to say anything new about the subject. Yet in his nicely written, imaginatively conceived, and cogently argued book, W. Fitzhugh Brundage provides a fresh approach, perspective, and insight; this study contains many intriguing twists and turns, defies predictability, often upsets conventional wisdom, and challenges our notions of how the past was used.

Like many scholars, Brundage sees historical memory not simply as "the articulation of some shared subconscious, but rather the product of intentional creation." The recalled past thus consists of "those common remembrances that identify a group, giving it a sense of its past and defining its aspirations for the future." Collective remembering, he says, "forges identity, justifies privilege, and sustains cultural norms," supplying a kind of "genealogy of social identity" (p. 4). Encompassing the period from the Civil War to the present, Southern Past is more broadly and sweepingly considered than any previous study of southern historical memory. In contrast to other historians who have stressed the memory of the Civil War, he sees the key event as slavery and freedom and African Americans' struggle for equality, existing in counterpoint to concepts of white supremacy. Brundage emphasizes that versions of the southern past, white and black, have turned on race, and an ensuing struggle suggests what he calls a "profoundly important debate over the South's heritage, one that will continue to shape the region's public life for the foreseeable future" (p. 3).

Southern Past is novel also in method and approach. Using recent conceptualizations about public space, Brundage views the contestation of the past as part of a dialogue about civic democracy. Going beyond the written and spoken word, Brundage considers public space—which was, he says, located somewhere between the home and state—as central to memory and as "the most important arena for struggles over public power, resources, and values." Those groups dominating public spaces controlled views of the past; commemorations, in forms as diverse as parades to monuments, defined consciousness about the past. Access to public space meant a collective, group power, becoming a marker of public identity that could be both inclusive and exclusive. In this expanded conceptualization of memory, Brundage employs material culture and the built environment as important indicators—as significant, perhaps, as the written word.

Competing narratives about the past, he maintains, primarily concerned race. A white version of the past dominated southern memory, just as white supremacy was controlling in social, cultural, and political life. It was long assumed that "the South" meant the white South and that its version was the "true" narrative, but this was part of a sort of cultural hegemony that promoted power. There was a social power to white memory that shaped the character of public spaces, but a black version of the past always competed with it. This struggle between white and black concepts of historical memory, according to Brundage, constitutes a "central theme of the...