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  • Reconstruction and the Cruel Optimism of Citizenship
  • Nancy Bentley (bio)

If something unites the varied efforts among scholars to rethink the literature of Reconstruction, it may be the paradoxical claim that this cultural period defies periodization. This claim goes beyond the truism that there are no natural or given boundaries in human history. Rather, scholars suggest that the “boundarylessness” of Reconstruction is acute and historically distinct (Marrs 419). Examined closely, Reconstruction-era dichotomies turn into continuities. Postbellum nation-building perpetuates antebellum white rule. Peacetime reconciliation is predicated on a warlike reign of terror. Postwar nationalism cannot be cleanly separated from ongoing transnational movements, from international diplomacy to the longue-durée struggle for black emancipation. Yet in her recent cultural history Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship (2018), Carrie Hyde argues that the era of Reconstruction does in fact contain a definitive periodizing event. The 1868 ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment provided the first constitutional definition of citizenship, after some 80 years in which the concept was “juridically unregulated” and “politically inconsistent” (6). Hyde argues that the aesthetic or “speculative” discourses that were hitherto the primary cultural traditions of citizenship in the US, from fiction and Christian theology to natural law philosophy, had to cede pride of place to the law, armed as it now was with the official power of the citizenship clause in the Constitution.

What might this legal event tell us about recent efforts to enlarge and reexamine the archives of Reconstruction? I hazard two suggestions. The first is that the Constitution’s new authority to define citizenship had as a side effect the possibility for a heightened [End Page 608] sense of the tragic: because legal language now monopolized the terms of official political belonging, the state-regulated status of citizen became at once a more alluring promise and a more devastating privation. The essays in this issue supply ample stories of tragic loss and exclusion. But they may also allow us to see citizenship itself in a new light––not as a holy grail that will (someday, somehow) realize a perfected union, but as a state operation of binary inclusion/exclusion that spreads new displacements and divisions in the name of national unity. A second possibility follows from the first. When law becomes the sole arbiter of citizenship, it also clears the way to give a new salience to alternative ideas of political belonging. This special issue invites us to see in the archives of Reconstruction a wide range of figures for liberation, justice, and solidarity that outstrip the concept of citizenship and that channel energies of what Hyde calls “civic longing” in new directions.

Indignant at Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s, virulently racist portrait of Reconstruction in The Leopard’s Spots (1902), Charles Chesnutt sent a copy of his novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) to President Theodore Roosevelt and select members of Congress.1 Little is known about this episode: Did any of those elected officials read it? Did Chesnutt’s depiction of the 1898 racial massacre in Wilmington, NC, cast doubt in any reader’s mind on Dixon’s portrait of the same event in The Leopard’s Spots? What is certain is that Dixon’s romance of Southern redemption fed a view of Reconstruction that prevailed in popular culture and historiography for much of the century. As that view faced a widespread challenge in the post–Civil Rights era, Chesnutt’s novel gained a new visibility. The Marrow of Tradition punctures Dixon’s vicious racial myths: where Dixon casts black citizenship as a travesty that unleashed a tide of violence in communities and polities, Chesnutt describes the “big steal” that robbed African Americans of the citizenship rights awarded them in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments (648).

Seen through this lens, the law’s promise of civil participation undergoes a tragic reversal. Declaring black citizenship by turns a “farce” and a form of anarchic black “dominance,” the white conspirators in The Marrow of Tradition make constitutional guarantees of inclusion into a weapon of violent exclusion (527, 535). There is no gainsaying the tragic dimensions of this legal betrayal, and perhaps no other novel can match Marrow’s searing indictment...

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