The Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White by Brook Thomas (review)

Brook Thomas's The Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White is a significant and provocative work. As his title suggests, Thomas seeks to complicate traditional understandings of Reconstruction through a close reading of literary texts and through careful attention to the related historiography, legislation, and jurisprudence. As he convincingly demonstrates, the complexity of Reconstruction is evident even in definitions of the term itself: while still commonly seen as ending in 1877, scholars such as Heather Cox Richardson have challenged this dating, and Thomas explains how even authors writing in the years following the Civil War often disagreed on when Reconstruction finally ended. For his part, while Thomas recognizes the utility of the traditional bounds of the period, he expands his analysis to cover what he terms the "era of Reconstruction," when "its influence was still powerful and hope for its renewal was still alive. So defined, the era of Reconstruction extended into the first years of the twentieth century" (26). This definition informs Thomas's selection of authors: while he does discuss writers like Constance Fenimore Woolson and John William De Forest, who published novels and short stories during the 1860s and '70s, Thomas centers his work on the following authors, several of whom published works shortly before and after the turn of the twentieth century: Albion Tourgée, George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Thomas Dixon, and Charles Chesnutt (30). At the same time, Thomas also addresses many others, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and W. E. B. Du Bois, and he offers a groundbreaking analysis of the work of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, expanding our understanding of the influence of Reconstruction beyond the familiar North/South binary.

With so many writers to choose from, Thomas explains his decision to concentrate primarily on six by noting both their influence on popular views of Reconstruction, and their interconnectedness: "Most of these works were written in dialogue with one another, and to understand them we need to read them in context of one another" (30). With this dialogic framing in mind, Thomas employs both close reading and historical research in thematic chapters such as "Federalism," "The Ku Klux Klan," and "Working with the Heritage of the Old South," exploring how each of these writers dealt with the subject at hand. While such an approach allows Thomas to explore these literary works from a number of different angles, highlighting the numerous Reconstruction-era issues represented within them, it also throws into relief the challenge some of these texts pose for modern readers and scholars. Particularly when dealing with texts like The Leopard's Spots that have rightly been condemned for their racist portrayals of African Americans, Thomas's work exposes the tension created by the effort to acknowledge the racist assumptions informing them while simultaneously engaging in careful analysis of other themes. To cite one example, in "Working with the Heritage of the Old South," Thomas contrasts authors' differing representations of what a reconstructed South might look like. In comparing the visions of Dixon and Page, he writes, "Dixon's vision of an industrialized New South is in stark contrast to Page's agrarianism linked to a past of plantations. Although, understandably, criticism of The Clansman focuses almost exclusively on Dixon's racism, his most famous work also suggests the importance of industry for the South" (256). Thomas's attention to industrialization in this instance allows him to make the innovative argument that "Dixon's indictment of northern capitalist corruption . . . has surprising similarities with the view of his archenemy W. E. B. Du Bois" (258), and it fits firmly within his larger project of complicating "plain black and white" views of Reconstruction. Still, Dixon's racism is so central to his work that it can be difficult to read past it to explore the critique of capitalism that Thomas illuminates.

With that challenge in mind, one of the strengths of Thomas's...