Reenvisioning Reconstruction: An Introduction

In creating this special issue on Reconstruction, I want particularly to recognize the renewal of interest over the past ten years in this subject. A nucleus of scholars has been revisiting the period and committing a great deal of industry and intelligence toward uncovering its critical exigencies in ways previous generations of Americanists had missed. Major books exploring the contours of Reconstruction, by Jennifer Rae Greeson, Edlie Wong, Brook Thomas, Sharon Kennedy-Nolle, Carolyn Karcher, Gregory Laski, and Elizabeth Renker, among others, have now appeared, and more are soon to come. Reconstruction, it is safe to say, has fully arrived as a field of inquiry that Americanists can pursue as vigorously as they have other eras.

This issue, then, takes shape as a progress report, a survey of where we are now in studying Reconstruction and a probing of what remains to do. Amid the many anxieties galvanizing Reconstruction writing—the worry over union, forgiveness, and defeat—the problem of what to remember and enshrine permeates the literature, so it is inevitable that scholars may also find themselves in the grip of what their predecessors did or left undone. If Reconstruction had seemed settled business—among the subjects least touched by the revisionism of the 1980s and 1990s—contemporary scholars are exerting their energies to revitalize our understanding of this troubling period. Why has it taken so long? In a sense, nineteenth-century American literature scholars, with such redoubtable exceptions as Saidiya Hartman and Eric Sundquist, had dedicated themselves to more pressing concerns in the general endeavor of recreating the canon. By contrast, Reconstruction had seemed a less immediate task.

For so many Americanists past, the risk/reward of studying Reconstruction did not seem quite as promising as the intellectual wager of reshaping the American Renaissance, especially along racial and gender grounds, or reimagining the age of realism, the Gilded Age, and the cultures of US imperialism at the turn of the century. Those were crucial needs for Americanists to address, and they certainly proved to be among our truly lasting accomplishments. It is also true that revisionists, especially those dedicated to gender and African American literature, were deeply engaged by a whole new archive, as well as literary forms to be newly appreciated and longstanding questions about the means of distribution to be tackled.

Moreover, for a very long time, Reconstruction studies was mostly understood as falling within the purview of Southern studies, its literature enjoying a regional, even local color appeal. The representation of Reconstruction writing in anthologies was, for decades, normally restricted to some stories by Joel Chandler Harris and George Washington Cable, and, more recently, since the prominence of African American writing, Charles Chesnutt, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Hopkins. It wasn’t that anthologies were uninterested in postwar writing, but their editors tended to blend Reconstruction into what used to be called the “search for order,” around which the period 1865 to 1914 was organized. That search was generally represented by writing that could communicate the ardor for realism and naturalism, along with urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. Rather than have its own unit on college syllabi or in graduate curricula, the literature of Reconstruction was typically subsumed within this larger schematizing.

The commentators in this special issue note that Reconstruction studies have suffered from a kind of critical embarrassment. Its literature rarely enjoyed the favor of either the liberal humanists or the New Critics, neither of which seemed to engage much with it. On the one hand, Reconstruction writing was understood as serving a form of cultural expression that even before the Civil Rights movement was regarded as mostly popular literature rather than canonical treasures. It was either vernacular writing or, at its most genteel, merely nostalgic, and thus not serious enough that it could stand with those poets and novelists who might be cast as nineteenth-century precursors of the literary modernism forwarding twentieth-century radical politics.

On the other hand, it also failed to engage the old formalists. The poetry did not seem to embed the virtues of paradox or the interplay of overt, opposing principles that New Criticism championed as the ideal...