African American Literary Reconstructions and the “Propaganda of History”

Abstract

The first story of African American literature in Reconstruction that many students and scholars still hear is a story of absence. That story is wrong in both broad conception and specific details, but it is worth quickly retelling for context. Key scholarly reference works of the 1970s and 1980s—decades that featured a notable broadening of the canon and US literary history—offered little revision to earlier assertions that there essentially wasn’t an African American literature of Reconstruction. The landmark History of Southern Literature (1985), compiled under editor Louis D. Rubin, Jr., for example, gave its first in-depth treatment of African American writers in a chapter called “Black Novelists and Novels, 1930–1950”; a laudatory New York Times review claimed that the book “highlighted the chief currents and the crucial changes in Southern imaginative expression over three and a half centuries” and offered the “most encyclopedic . . . history of Southern black writing yet compiled” (Lewis BR18). Similarly, the immense Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), prepared under editor Emory Elliott, generally ignored African American literature in and of Reconstruction even as it offered interesting bits on Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt—the latter contribution prompting a Times review to grumpily assert that the volume made “earnest, ungainly efforts to represent ‘minority’ voices” (Adams BR6).