Afterword—The Racialized Past is Racist Prologue: The Relevance and Resonance of Historical Novels in the Age of Trump

I’m truly honored to be here at the very first White House Conference on American History. So important. Our mission is to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character. We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.

—President Donald J. Trump

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

—James Baldwin

It is a space of reckoning that allows us to revisit times of historical contingency and possibility to consider alternatives that may have been unthought in those times, and might otherwise remain so now, in order to imagine different futures for what lies ahead. This is not a project of merely telling history differently, but one of returning to the past, its gaps, uncertainties, impasses, and elisions.

—Lisa Lowe (175)

At 2:39 PM (EST) on 17 September 2020, in the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom of the National Archives Building, Vice President Mike Pence delivered introductory remarks in accordance with the Trump administration’s inaugural White House Conference on American History. Apropos the past-concentrated occasion and consonant with the records-oriented setting, the former Indiana governor and six-term US representative reminded a small audience comprised of fellow administration officials, students, educators, and other conference participants that “two hundred thirty-three years ago today, our founders completed what for them was the work of a nation but for humanity a work for the ages: the Constitution of the United States.” Notwithstanding the vice president’s patriotic tone vis-à-vis the Constitution’s national function (as generative US document) and exponential international impact (for example, on “humanity”), Pence’s comments quickly assumed a dystopic register when his address shifted from celebrated eighteenth-century founding to denigrated twenty-first-century culture war. Accessing an anachronistic yet familiar Cold War rhetoric of invasion, subversion, eradication, and reeducation wherein foreign threat is interchangeable with domestic menace, Pence ominously acknowledged that

as President Trump has observed, in too many of our schools and universities, millions of young people are educated by those who seek to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. But we gather here today, soon to hear from the President of the United States, as Americans who are committed to affirming the greatness of this nation and the ideals of our founders.

Pence’s oblique representation of US history—which indiscriminately marbleizes presumed American “founding fathers,” superficially monumentalizes US democratic values, and unequivocally advocates for the preservation of both at all costs and without amendment—inadvertently yet potently underscores the relevance and resonance of this MELUS special issue, which focuses its analytical and creative attention on ethnic American historical fiction. Loosely defined as a literary genre that uses the past as the basis for plot and characterization, historical fiction—as Jolie A. Sheffer’s introduction accentuates and recently acclaimed novels such as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) and The Nickel Boys (2019), Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2016), Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman (2020), and Angie Cruz’s Dominicana (2019) confirm— has enjoyed an identifiable resurgence.¹ Notwithstanding considerable heterogeneity in terms of authorship, emplotment, and past-preoccupied setting, what functions as a unifying literary mode in this special issue is evocatively emblematized in the storyline focus and title of self-described “good hapa and bad Nisei ” writer Jackson Bliss’s “Secret Codes & Oppressive Histories” (2020).² Comprised of two alternating father/daughter viewpoints and divided into seven correspondent sections, “Secret Codes & Oppressive Histories” employs as primary plot a vexed relationship between a Japanese American father and his estranged mixed-race daughter. What emerges over the course of “Secret Codes & Oppressive Histories” is an ostensibly insurmountable polarization wherein the father’s anti-war...