Deconstructing Reconstruction

Abstract

When it comes to thinking about state power, racial difference, and traumatic memory in the US, deconstruction has proved more fashionable than Reconstruction. As opposed to a critical orientation that is popularly associated with European intellectual cool, Reconstruction seems a stuffy domain that yields little beyond items of antiquarian interest. As such, the impact of post–Civil War writing upon US literary studies has been often seen as negligible. Deconstruction as a tool, not Reconstruction as a period, has arguably been more significant in shaping how Americanist critics read. This disposition is understandable since Reconstruction delimits a historical era, not a mode of reading and interpretation. After all, how could this era, one construed in narrowest terms as the federal occupation of the South that lasted from 1865 to 1877, provide any usable hermeneutics for configuring, to say nothing of reconfiguring, US literary production more broadly? The tendency to associate Reconstruction with the “nadir” of black literary expression (Bruce) or to construe it as postscript to an “unwritten war” (Aaron) risks lumping this era’s artifacts into the Gilded Age and frequently ignores them altogether. The cumulative effect is the notion that Reconstruction has little to offer beyond the particular tragedies of its own literary history. Yet the impression that the literary history of Reconstruction is somehow provincial does not fit with the importance that, for instance, legal scholars give to this historical period for understanding the evolution of a penitentiary apparatus that imprisons millions of people of color, as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) makes starkly clear. Nor does it fit with W. E. B. Du Bois’s observations in Black Reconstruction in America (1935) that misrepresentations of this era have proved absolutely fundamental in discrediting black citizenship ever since emancipation. In contrast to the significance that the history of the interregnum has for other fields, US literary studies has a harder time suggesting that Reconstruction might affect how we recover, mine, and situate—that is, read and interpret—literature both before and after the Civil War.