Remixing the Civil War: Meditations on the Sesquicentennial

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In the entertainment industry, a remix is a way of relayering tracks of recorded sound to create a new audio package for a song or soundtrack. Given the postmodern enamorment with playfulness and artifice, it was probably inevitable that remix would be appropriated as a clever way of saying reinterpretation with a sly wink and a hermeneutic nod. Nor does the editor Thomas J. Brown pull shy of flaunting Remixing the Civil War as a “candid celebration” of a “post-national imagination” of the Civil War, which is “at odds with previous remembrance of the conflict” (pp. 13–14). In the eight essays that make up this collection, a great deal of “inauthenticity, surface, and humor” is applied to the ways the Civil War has been described and interpreted—not, however, without a good deal of the ponderous, the didactic, and the humorless returning once the postmodern cabaret has finished (p. 14). The most unencumbered of these essays are the two opening forays, by C. Wyatt Evans, “The Lincoln-Obama Moment,” and by Brown on the unhappy fortunes of the Confederate battle flag. Evans is intrigued by the energy with which President Barack Obama sought to identify himself with Abraham Lincoln during the 2008 campaign, as well as by how quickly all such allusions dropped away after President Obama's inauguration. A great many historical commentators across the political spectrum doubted the credibility of such an identification, and this is partly the reason for its comparatively brief shelf life. But another part of that disappearance lies with what Evans sees as the Democratic party's long-term difficulty in deploying American history to its benefit as part of ordinary political discourse. Obama's identification with Lincoln only temporarily “grabbed the story back” (p. 18).