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  • Sic et Non
  • Peter A. Coclanis (bio)

For the better part of fifteen years in the 1970s and 1980s Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese were the power couple in the circles in which southern historians ran. Brilliant, prolific, stylish, even glamorous, they were our equivalent of couples such as Sartre-Beauvoir, McCarthy-Wilson, and Hardwick-Lowell. Their writings were debated, their feuds savored, their sightings remarked upon, their notice treasured. That Genovese and Fox-Genovese were associated with the Left during that period undoubtedly added to their allure, but scholars of all political persuasions respected and admired their work, however much many may have disagreed with it.

In the late 1980s, however, the couple’s image began to change. To be sure, they still had their admirers, but over the course of the next fifteen years or so the general view of the pair shifted, in Kübler-Ross-like stages, from respect and admiration to bewilderment, then in turn to disbelief, anger, repudiation, and indifference. Why? In my view largely because Genovese and Fox-Genovese—both of whom had always been cultural conservatives—were seen to have shifted both their political allegiances and, more important, their scholarly orientations sharply to the right.

Of course, it is possible to argue that Genovese and Fox-Genovese had “been disappeared” by “progressive” scholars in part because (a) their work was becoming more rarified, esoteric, and abstract, or (b) the two scholars, whether writing individually or as partners, published some (but hardly all) of their work in less prominent and sometimes downright obscure venues. This said, it must be remembered that during the same period many “progressive” historians were devouring the opaque, not to say incomprehensible work of writers on the Left such as Ranajit Guha, Fredric Jameson, and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. And, truth be told, few “progressives” had expressed much concern earlier when Genovese (and, to a lesser extent, Fox-Genovese) invoked the rarified, esoteric, and abstract—but Marxist—theorist Antonio Gramsci. Moreover, a large portion of Genovese’s and Fox-Genovese’s work continued to appear under distinguished imprints such as the University of South Carolina Press, University of Georgia Press, University of North Carolina Press, and Harvard University Press, which suggests to me at least that their “disappearance” was due rather more to their purported political and interpretive migration than to anything else.


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Eugene Genovese speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), 2010.

In recent years, however, the worm has turned, as it were, and Genovese and Fox-Genovese have returned to scholarly view, if not necessarily to scholarly favor. Faute de mieux, one can point to the year 2004 as the turning point or, perhaps more accurately, tipping point. In that year the journal Radical History Review ran a very interesting “Genovese Forum,” and, more important, Michael O’Brien published his magisterial two-volume intellectual history of the antebellum South, Conjectures of Order, which covered some of the same terrain wherein Genovese and Fox-Genovese had situated themselves since the early to mid-1980s.1 The publication in 2005 of the massive Mind of the Master Class reminded historians that Genovese and Fox-Genovese were still with us, and Fox-Genovese’s untimely death in 2007 at the age of 66 led many to reread and reconsider her body of work. The appearance in 2008 of Genovese and Fox-Genovese’s Slavery in White and Black, a companion volume to The Mind of the Master Class, and the publication late in 2011 of another companion volume, Fatal Self-Deception, served further notice in this regard. And the publication of five volumes of Fox-Genovese’s essays by the University of South Carolina Press in 2011–2012 in a series entitled “History and Women, Culture and Faith,” under the general editorship of David Moltke-Hansen, will also do much to keep the scholarly world attuned—once again—to the two scholars who captivated the world of southern history lo so many years ago.2

Here, Stan Engerman and I have the honor and privilege of assessing the contributions made by Genovese and Fox-Genovese in The Mind of the...

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