Reconstructing Political Memory

Abstract

This chapter re-examines the political memory of the Reconstruction Era in United States history, with particular focus on how left and liberal political memories turn to the Reconstruction Era to call forth the lost possibilities of a radical effort to construct an equal society, on racial and economic terms in particular. Bruyneel focuses on the narrative of this period produced by W.E.B. Du Bois in his book, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 to reveal how, as important as is Du Bois’s narrative for our grasp of this moment, the story of land, land dispossession and Indigenous peoples resides in the background as a central but poorly attended aspect of this period. Bruyneel offers another way to remember the Reconstruction Era that accounts for Black and Indigenous politics, claims, and experiences as a radical memory that could be deployed in our time.