Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States by Travis M. Foster

Abstract

Reviewed by: Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States by Travis M. Foster Sarah Robertson Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States. By Travis M. Foster. (Oxford Studies in American Literary History) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2019. vii+168 pp. £53. ISBN 978–0–19–883809–8. Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States is a timely intervention into debates about the insidious levels of racism that have been the cornerstone of American society since slavery. Foster primarily examines the rise of white supremacy in the years after the American Civil War, yet usefully frames his discussion in the light of ongoing, systemic racism and the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013. Looking at the role narrative plays in proliferating white supremacy, Foster calls for greater critical recognition of how popular genres propagate political ideology and engender broad consensus. While Foster's central focus is on white supremacy, he also explores gospel sermons and the development of a post-emancipation African American collective identity. His examination of gospel sermons mirrors his approach across the book as he concentrates exclusively on popular genres. Foster's multigenre study explores the white popular genres of campus novels, the Ladies' Home Journal, and Civil War elegies, before considering gospel sermons in the closing chapter. He convincingly argues for the relevance of these less-studied, everyday genres to any understanding of how white nationalism emerged out of sectionalism's hostile divisions and of how African Americans were united by gospel sermons that preached an alternative communal vision. Indeed, Foster suggests that the everyday nature of these genres, which reached individuals, families, and communities across the nation, was a critical element in crystallizing notions of collective identity. For Foster, the popular appeal of campus novels between the 1860s and the turn of the twentieth century was concomitant with significant changes occurring in higher education as US universities and colleges sought 'to assert themselves as epicentres of American futurity' and 'models for new configurations of democratic community and networks for installing a more robust national identity' (p. 29). Foster convincingly argues that these campus novels, which championed notions of fraternity and nostalgia, reflected the white-centric model of national identity that was being reforged in the final decades of the nineteenth century. In a similar vein, he goes on to explore how readers of the Ladies' Home Journal repeatedly encountered anti-black messages while being indoctrinated into a 'politics of friendship in which intimacy between white women naturalized whiteness as the foremost precondition for American citizenship' (p. 44). In his work on Civil War elegies, Foster calls for a more critically nuanced reading of the genre as he explores three distinct 'attitudes for mourning and remembering [End Page 489] the dead: nationalist, antiwar, and melancholic' (p. 63). His approach to elegies challenges what Foster perceives as a tendency among critics to focus on 'literary exceptionalism' rather than on forms and genres whose 'ordinariness [. . .] might help us to apprehend the ordinary as something other than flat' (p. 67). Indeed, the crux of Foster's argument about white supremacy rests on the pernicious quality of genres whose 'everydayness' belies the political messages at their core, while he also examines how the reach and ordinariness of gospel sermons helped to undermine 'the logic of white supremacy and white nationalism through experimentation with forms of being and being together' (p. 87). Across the study, Foster significantly moves beyond southern racism in the Jim Crow South as he underlines the nationwide appeal of these genres. This line of enquiry comes to the fore particularly in Chapter 3 in Foster's discussion of Civil War elegies, and the way these poetic forms circumvented sectionalism in their mourning lament for lost, white lives, both North and South. Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States contains a timely emphasis on Northern as well as Southern racism and how the two regions were actively encouraged to put aside hostilities and antipathy after the Civil War to reunite around a white nationalist ideal. However, a more sustained examination of how those genres reached both Northern and Southern audiences would have fully underscored Foster's...