Post-54: Reconstructing Civil War Memory in American Literature afterBrown

Abstract

AbstractFrom a cultural fad of Confederate flags to a spate of schools named after Confederate generals, the 1954 Brown v. Board decision revived the memory of the US Civil War. In their collective effort of “massive resistance,” white southerners considered themselves carrying on the legacy of their Confederate ancestors, rebelling against the federal government and insisting upon states’ rights. In response to this revival, many mid-century writers revised Civil War memory. Ralph Ellison, for example, considered the Brown decision as yet another battle in an ongoing Civil War. The works of Black writers such as James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Pauli Murray, and Margaret Walker, as well as white writers such as Robert Lowell, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Robert Penn Warren, revise Lost Cause cultural narratives as they reconstruct four sites of Civil War memory: monuments, schools, textbooks, and grandparents. Writers in the twenty-first century have extended the interest in Civil War memory, from the essays of Ta-Nehisi Coates to the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, to the fiction of George Saunders to the poetry of Natasha Trethewey and Kevin Young. The return of Civil War memory in twenty-first-century literature anticipates and represents the resurgence of civil rights protest against ongoing, state-sanctioned racial violence.