Deconstructing Reconstruction

When it comes to thinking about state power, racial difference, and traumatic memory in the US, deconstruction has proved more fashionable than Reconstruction. As opposed to a critical orientation that is popularly associated with European intellectual cool, Reconstruction seems a stuffy domain that yields little beyond items of antiquarian interest. As such, the impact of post–Civil War writing upon US literary studies has been often seen as negligible. Deconstruction as a tool, not Reconstruction as a period, has arguably been more significant in shaping how Americanist critics read.

This disposition is understandable since Reconstruction delimits a historical era, not a mode of reading and interpretation. After all, how could this era, one construed in narrowest terms as the federal occupation of the South that lasted from 1865 to 1877, provide any usable hermeneutics for configuring, to say nothing of reconfiguring, US literary production more broadly? The tendency to associate Reconstruction with the “nadir” of black literary expression (Bruce) or to construe it as postscript to an “unwritten war” (Aaron) risks lumping this era’s artifacts into the Gilded Age and frequently ignores them altogether. The cumulative effect is the notion that Reconstruction has little to offer beyond the particular tragedies of its own literary history. Yet the impression that the literary history of Reconstruction is somehow provincial does not fit with the importance that, for instance, legal scholars give to this historical period for understanding the evolution of a penitentiary apparatus that imprisons millions of people of color, as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) makes starkly clear. Nor does it fit with W. E. B. Du Bois’s observations in Black Reconstruction in America (1935) that misrepresentations of this era have proved absolutely fundamental in discrediting black citizenship ever since emancipation. In contrast to the significance that the history of the interregnum has for other fields, US literary studies has a harder time suggesting that Reconstruction might affect how we recover, mine, and situate—that is, read and interpret—literature both before and after the Civil War.

Imagine a critic interested in examining how terrorism and state power have become entwined around one other. An approach indebted to deconstruction, as Giovanna Borradori suggests in Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003), recommends itself for grinding down this assemblage to its basic ideological bits. But might not historicist attention to the coordination of white terrorism and state juridical practice during Reconstruction prove equally useful? To ask this question is to wonder openly about whether Reconstruction might generate approaches to history as opposed to being seen simply as history itself. Could Reconstruction be construed as more than a primary object of study and something along the lines of a method?

As a primary object, the post–Civil War era has been fertile ground for generations of historians, from the tragic view of the Dunning School to the Progressive-era work of Charles and Mary Beard to the more recent contributions by Eric Foner, Leon F. Litwack, Barbara J. Fields, and others dubbed postrevisionists (see Hahn 337). Literary scholars, in contrast, have often viewed Reconstruction as a fallow period, treating it as an awkward transitional moment that is best understood as a footnote to the Civil War or as a prelude to realism. As this special issue makes clear, that situation is changing, as literary critics and literary historians are arguing that the fragments of a novel such as Hearts and Homes (1865) (see Benjamin Fagan’s essay) or the poetry of white reconciliation in Sidney Lanier’s “Psalm of the West” (see Timothy Sweet’s essay) are primary objects that merit analysis and interpretation. Nonetheless, the question remains: Can the deep dive into the archival past of Reconstruction do more than resurface with lost treasures that can be added to the next round of anthologies? Let me dispel the suspense by stating now that in my view the answer is “yes”—provided such primary objects can deconstruct the assumptions and sequencing of literary history that so often motivate historicizing in the first place.

The relative inattention to Reconstruction among literary scholars represents a missed opportunity for leveraging critical understandings of...