Authenticity, Memory, and Materiality: Disgraced Memorials and Issues of Permanence

Memorials romanticizing the short-lived Confederate States of America remain scattered across public spaces. Yet, little research examines whether memorials are consequential for residents that live proximate to them. This study relies on insights from social stress theory to examine associations between the local presence of public Confederate memorials and the mental health of African American and Afro-Caribbean adults. Data for this study are merged from the National Survey of American Life (n=4,740) and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s census of Confederate memorials. We examine associations between counts of local Confederate memorials and depressive symptomatology, self-rated mental health, and substance use disorder. Results from gender-stratified generalized models show that logged memorial counts are curvilinearly associated with mental health among Black women such that psychological adjustment is typically poorest in counties with an average number of memorials. In these spaces, African American women experience significantly greater depressive symptoms than Afro-Caribbean women. Moreover, social cohesion—familial support, membership with a pro-Black organization, frequent contact with neighbors, and ethnic closeness—modifies associations between memorials and mental health such that women with high levels of cohesion typically experience buffered mental health impacts when residing proximal to memorials. This study highlights the importance of critically investigating stressors extending from white supremacy across social statuses and theorizing resourcefulness against antiblack racism.

Especially in the South, the legacy of the American Civil War (1861–1865) remains entrenched in social conflict. To honor Confederate war dead, hundreds of monuments were erected in the South during the Jim Crow era, an overtly racist period beginning a generation after the war ended, up to the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. This essay examines three prominent public Confederate monuments in the state of North Carolina—located in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. Bitter controversies over the fate of Confederate monuments in public landscapes have pitted coalitions of Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists against leftist anti-racist counter-protesters. Some argue that monuments are “neutral” historical markers that honor those who died for their beliefs; others argue that they encode and empower intolerable racist ideology. Should such divisive “objects of remembrance” be allowed to remain in public places? This essay explores the responsibilities of designers who purport to represent a broad and increasingly diverse constituency and the function of public memorials for constructing narratives and counter-narratives.

This guide accompanies the following article: Matthew W. Hughey, ‘The Janus Face of Whiteness: Toward a Cultural Sociology of White Nationalism and White Antiracism’, Sociology Compass 3/6 (2009): 920–936, 10.1111/j.1751‐9020.2009.00244.x Author’s introduction Over the past 20 years, the study of white racial identity has received in‐depth, interdisciplinary attention. Under sociological scrutiny, the study of whiteness has traversed quite a few stages: from understandings of whiteness as a category replete with social privileges, as a mere reflection of non‐racial (often class‐based) dynamics, to its most recent turn that emphasizes the contextual and intersectional heterogeneity of whiteness. Because of the increased attention to context and political disputes, the study of whiteness has never been more amenable to cultural analysis than it is today. Hence, an emphasis on different white racial formations that span a political spectrum – from conservative to liberal and racist to antiracist – is now dominant. In this vein, white nationalists and white antiracists represent the distinct polarities of contemporary inquisitions into white racial identity. Motivated by this academic milieu, this guide offers an overview of the major scholarship that address white nationalism & white antiracism, appropriate online materials, and examples from a sample syllabus. Together, these resources aim to assist in understanding the general processes and contexts that produce ‘whiteness’ and imbue it with meaning, the social relationships and practices in which white racial identity identities become embedded, and how whiteness simultaneously possesses material and symbolic privileges alongside diverse and seemingly antagonistic experiences. Author recommends The complexity of whiteness McDermott, Monica and Frank L. Samson 2005. ‘White Racial and Ethnic Identity in the United States.’ Annual Review of Sociology 31 : 245–61. Any contemporary apprentice of the sociological study of white racial identity should read this essay. Monica McDermott and her student Frank Samson combine to provide a robust overview of the literature. They walk the tightrope of balancing both a broad coverage of the literature with the depth that key studies necessitate. In so doing, they put a finger on the key dilemma of studying white racial identity today: ‘Navigating between the long‐term staying power of white privilege and the multifarious manifestations of the experience of whiteness remains the task of the next era of research on white racial and ethnic identity’ (2005: 256). Duster, Troy 2001. ‘The ‘Morphing’ Properties of Whiteness.’ Pp. 113–33 in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness , edited by E. B. Rasmussen, E. Klinenberg, I. J. Nexica and M. Wray. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. In this essay – part of a larger volume on whiteness that I also recommend – Duster synthesizes disparate approaches to the study of whiteness. Demonstrating how some scholars understand white racial identity as a contextual and cognitive category (‘fluid’), while some frame whiteness as a structural and fixed category of material privileges (‘frozen’), Duster asks ‘who is right?’ He answers via the metaphor of whiteness‐as‐water. In one moment, whiteness can morph into vapor as a contextual and unstable identity, while the next moment it can instantly transform into a harsh and unyielding form of ice‐like privilege. Duster’s essay is an excellent retort for those who argue that we should move ‘beyond’ race to the utopian realm of color‐blind individualism. Duster demonstrates, although the example of the supposedly egalitarian New Deal, that while race is socially constructed, the legacy of racism remains a historically reproduced and real social fact – denying the existence of race perpetuates racial inequality. Duster closes the chapter with a personal anecdote that grounds the historical example in modern, interactional, and everyday life. Perry, Pamela 2002. Shades of White: White Kids and Racial Identities in High School . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Perry gives us two ethnographic studies in one – that of two northern California high schools: one located in a predominantly white, if economically diverse, suburb, the other situated in a multiracial urban community. Perry persistently and systematically probes the complexities of white racial identity in the practices and discourses of the youth attending these high schools. She finds that whites in the predominantly white, suburban high school do not see themselves as a unique race and take their racial identity for granted – they understand distinctly white practices as normative rather than as constitutive of a subjective worldview. In contrast, the whites at the multiracial, urban high school possess a more critical and comparative view of race and their own place in the racial order. In sum, Perry argues that whiteness is a set of complex, contradictory, and multiple subject positions. Wray, Matt. 2006. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Matt Wray brings the tools of cultural sociology viz‐á‐viz ‘symbolic boundaries’ to the interrogation of the moniker White Trash . Wray problematizes this relatively normalized term to question its origins and how it persists. Drawing upon literary texts, folklore, diaries, medical articles, and social scientific analyses from the early 1700s to the turn of the 20th century, Wray documents the multiple meanings that were projected onto poor rural whites in the United States. Of particular import, Wray demonstrates how white supremacist ideas about class and region became dominant through public health campaigns and eugenic reformations. Impoverished whites found themselves the targets of officials and activists who framed them as ‘filthy’ or “feebleminded,” and thus a threat to the purity and supremacy of the white race. This text is particularly informative for its demonstration of how white supremacist logic was not only focused on racial ‘otherness’ but used the axes of class and location to directly demarcate and attack those seen as ‘white’ yet somehow racially deficient and unworthy. Winant, Howard 2004. ‘Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary U.S. Racial Politics.’ Pp. 3–16 in Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society , edited by Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell and April Burns. New York, NY: Routledge. In applying his now classic approach formulated in concert with Michael Omi ( Racial Formations , 1986), Howard Winant applies the ‘racial projects’ thesis to whites: ‘I think it would be beneficial to attempt to sort out alternative conceptions of whiteness, along with the politics that both flow from and inform these conceptions. … focusing on five key racial projects, which I term, far right, new right, neoconservative, neoliberal, and new abolitionist ’ (2004: 6). Hence, Winant maps a theory of white identity formation onto a bifurcated ‘culture war.’ Labeling this phenomenon ‘racial dualism as politics,’ Winant advances a paradigm in which whiteness is undergoing ‘a profound political crisis.’ Winant’s essay is especially important for those that wish to emphasize the heterogeneity of white racial identity, as he provides Weberian‐like ‘ideal types’ for the comprehension of the racial‐political landscape. Hughey, Matthew W. (forthcoming 2010). ‘Navigating the (Dis)similarities of White Racial Identities: The Conceptual Framework of “Hegemonic Whiteness.”’ Ethnic & Racial Studies. In this work, I build upon many of the aforementioned studies. Like Pamela Perry (2002) I dive into two ethnographic sites, but of much different breed. To interrogate how whiteness might be akin to ‘vapor and ice’ (Duster 2001) and to provide a robust answer to the dilemma of the ‘long‐term staying power of

ABSTRACTThe contemporary commemorative landscape of the United States is dense with Confederate memorials. Although the national tolerance for these monuments that honor sedition, rebellion, treason, and white supremacy has wanedin some communities, there is still widespread misunderstandings about their origins and intended meaning. This article tracesthe evolution of the commemoration of the Confederacy, the importance of white supremacy to the tradition, and the obstaclesthat impede the revision of this inherited landscape.

Through the life of Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina's self-styled agrarian rebel, this book traces the history of white male supremacy and its discontents from the era of plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow. As an anti-Reconstruction guerrilla, Democratic activist, South Carolina governor, and U.S. senator, Tillman offered a vision of reform that was proudly white supremacist. In the name of white male militance, productivity, and solidarity, he justified lynching and disfranchised most of his state's black voters. His arguments and accomplishments rested on the premise that only productive and virtuous white men should govern and that federal power could never be trusted. Over the course of his career, Tillman faced down opponents ranging from agrarian radicals to aristocratic conservatives, from woman suffragists to black Republicans. His vision and his voice shaped the understandings of millions and helped create the violent, repressive world of the Jim Crow South. Friend and foe alike--and generations of historians--interpreted Tillman's physical and rhetorical violence in defense of white supremacy as a matter of racial and gender instinct. This book instead reveals that Tillman's white supremacy was a political program and social argument whose legacies continue to shape American life. |Through the life of Benjamin R.Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina's notorious agrarian rebel, this book traces white male supremacy from plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow. As an anti-Reconstruction guerrilla, governor, and U.S. senator, he offered a vision of reform that was proudly white supremacist. This book argues that Tillman's white supremacy was a political program and social argument whose legacies continue to shape American life.

What do laws concerning Jim Crow racial oppression and mental health, disability, and addiction care have in common? How might an existing dataset of historical North Carolina General Assembly laws reveal legal intersections between racial oppression and mental health/disability/addiction care and control? This paper argues that, at the same time that North Carolina lawmakers used legislation to enact white supremacist ideologies, they also used similar tactics to inform how people marginalized because of their psychiatric diagnosis, disability, and/or substance abuse disorder, could be both cared for and controlled. In this paper, I present findings from a graduate research fellowship with On The Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance. On The Books (https://onthebooks.lib.unc.edu/) is a collections-as-data project of the University Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that used machine learning and scholarly expertise to produce a computationally-actionable dataset of North Carolina General Assembly Laws passed between 1866 and 1967. Both my dataset and the On The Books datasets are publicly available through the Carolina Digital Repository (CDR). My research drew on the On The Books datasets to create a new dataset of North Carolina’s disability, addiction, and mental health care laws during the same period, also publicly available through the CDR. I then conducted an exploratory analysis of these laws to better understand how they intersect with Jim Crow laws and what implications those intersections might reveal about North Carolina’s history of white supremacist policies. This paper offers one example of the research opportunities made possible by libraries’ efforts to make historical data publicly accessible and computationally-actionable.

I first drafted this poem on Christmas Eve 2016 in a Zeme Naga village called Laisong in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands. I was with Catriona Child, an activist and environmentalist who works in Naga areas, collecting oral histories about the Second World War and how locals memorialized the famous British female anthropologist Ursula Graham Bower, Catriona’s mother. Bower arrived for fieldwork here in 1937 and eventually worked in this region as an ethnographer, government representative, and later, a wartime intelligence and guerrilla leader after the Japanese invasion of neighboring Burma in 1942 and the push into the hills of India in 1944. The gramophone in the third stanza references her device, which Catriona told me her mother often used to entertain her friends in the village during her stay here. Catriona and I have a mutual interest in the War, but more broadly, in working together to engage and expand Bower’s family archives. By archive, we refer not only to papers and documents but a whole range of audio-visual materials and stories about Bower and how Nagas, in particular, remembered and continue to reference her. For us, this is also a project of co-interpreting an archive and exploring different world-views which met in Naga contexts in Assam and present-day Nagaland. We were in Laisong, which is in the Dima Hasao district of Assam, where Bower was based. Laisong is a Naga village inhabited by the Zeme Naga tribe. We additionally conducted documentation work in the area during celebrations of the winter festival, Hgangi. One village, in particular, was said to be the “last” of the communities to practice what was thought of as the pre-Christian “animistic” religion and its concomitant rituals and rites. It is noteworthy that only in recent decades have many Zeme rural communities converted to Christianity, while the variants of a native “Heraka” religion (increasingly becoming “Hinduized”), revived in the 1930s as part of an anti-colonial millennial movement, continue to be practiced. In this context, it is interesting that the “animist” Paupaise religion and the ritual celebration of an important seasonal event of the local calendar were perceivably layered with other religious motifs (such as Hindu ones) while reiterating the “indigenous” and “tribal” nature of the rituals. Moreover, the Naga folkloric and cosmological world has a rich tapestry replete with a parallel spiritual universe, origin myths, and numinous beings, including fluid human-animal relations professed through lore and lycanthropic forms. The poem’s narrative is inspired by these traditions, reflected in recent decades of literature produced by Naga writers in English and other languages. Often in these stories, the “real” anthropogenic world is interwoven with mythical and magical realms, and sensory boundaries are blurry. The Zeme communities claim to have been historically, geographically, and politically “excluded” from the ethno-territorial political formation of Nagaland and are spread across several states in northeastern India. The area in question is also dotted with “blank spaces” as to what constituted state and non-state (or “rebel state”) spaces and was strongly affected by the history of armed conflict. To generalize, the political dividends and collateral arising from the decades-long Naga self-determination movement and armed conflict since the end of the Second World War have been uneven, and communities here faced particular forms of exclusion, community fragmentation, and hardship. Zeme Naga-dominated areas around Laisong are particularly marginalized since they remained within Assam as a minority community in the border areas. Nagaland was created in 1963 after the territorial re-organization of Assam. Many Naga tribal communities also inhabit areas that fall outside the state in Assam, Manipur and the neighboring country of Myanmar. However, these groups do not enjoy the rights and protections that Nagas within Nagaland do. The poem reflects my interest in space, while references to cosmology are a less direct intervention of my research, but a subject of personal curiosity. Both space and cosmology are deeply interwoven into Naga folk-life and oral and material culture. The boundaries between what one might consider real, mythical, and surreal from a “rational” point of view are quite blurry and fluid. As such, my choices in framing the poem are inspired by this context and how I felt sitting under the stars on that night as I penned my thoughts. I sought to capture the layered realities and fragmentary temporalities without reifying or overly romanticizing them. In retrospect, while drafting revised versions of the poem, the methodological complexities became starker. Time, experience, and perception of space are collapsed, yet the depth of dimension is simultaneously comprehensible to the “outsider.” I use this term because it is loaded and hard to clarify even from my positionality in this context. I was an Assamese person in a Naga village within Assam, invited there by a British person pursuing her own historical and familial connections to the place and people there. One of the village elders had often introduced me as “our Assamese brother.” The insider-outsider binary is very stark in the region as a whole due to a long history of ethno-territorial conflicts that have only fuelled xenophobic discourses about “outsiders.” The contradictions of these binary discourses and territorial regimes are also more problematic as even Nagas in Assam, like our friends from Laisong require a special authorization called the Inner Line Permit to visit the state of Nagaland, which is the professed “homeland” of Nagas. To some extent, my position on that spectrum of insider-outsider also collapsed in my interactions and relationship with people in Laisong. The political histories of this village and the region as a whole are complex. The layered realities described in the poem are somewhat at odds with the ethnographic mode of perceiving, and in the end, actually undermine the narrative authority of the ethnographer precisely by confusing the assumed notions of being, boundaries of social difference, as well as myth and folklore in the area, including the history of the Second World War, which was, after all, a global, imperial war and did not mean the same thing for people here compared to European, American, Russian or Japanese empires that were fighting each other. Yet, other wars and conflicts, especially since WWII, have impinged on people’s lives in Laisong and Dima Hasao as a whole, caught in a coercive social economy between Indian armed forces and “insurgents.” The insurgent cadres also have strong kinship ties and often emerge from the local context, inviting coercive counterinsurgency measures that govern everyday lives. The reference to the army officer in the poem is inspired by an actual event during the Christmas feast in the Zeme village of Laisong in the Southeastern border zone of Assam. The presiding army Major from the adjoining Assam Rifles camp, with whom villagers here have had a troubled past, had been challenged in jest by a colleague to bite into this chili. The officer, however, diplomatically declined. I find poetic inspiration in this event, which I saw like one of those Orwellian moments like in George Orwell’s Shooting the Elephant (1950), when colonial authority was put to the test and had to be performed by pulling the trigger to kill the elephant, only to meet the expectations of the Burmese onlookers (see also Guha 1997). For me, any pretensions of an ethnographic “gaze” are blunted out, which is also a humbling experience. I did not see myself as an ethnographer there in the first place, but writing the poem pushed me to engage this question. Here I do not have the typical gaze of an anthropologist looking through a photographic lens as once may have been the case with several colonial anthropologists who worked on different Naga groups. Rather, I find myself enmeshed within the layered experiences of reality and perception that go into the continuous process of history-writing and lived history, neither of which are linear. Then there is the futility of ethnographic description, never being able to capture it in entirety, but only fleetingly, even if these realities can be visceral for the people living there. The dissolution of the body and perception of the ethnographer also signals the embeddedness and entanglement of the person to the “field,” which continuously constitutes what is imagined as a field-site. Thus, the ethnographer and field are in constant flux, much like layered histories, bodies, and changing meanings of objects across contexts and time. Depth of Field in the poem’s title refers to greater perceptual insight. Although it is a visual metaphor from photography, the depth here is a simultaneous broadening and sharpening of interpretation and access that de-centers the authority of the gaze, another optical metaphor. Field, too, carries dual meanings, both a site of investigation and the multiple sensory and temporal realms that come together.

This article examines the process of racialization as an essential aspect of how everyday geographies are made, understood, and challenged. It begins from the premise that a primary root of modern American race relations can be found in the southern past, especially in how that past was imagined, articulated, and performed during a crucial period: the post-Reconstruction era known as “Jim Crow.” More than just a reaction to a turbulent world where Civil War defeat destabilized categories of power and authority, white cultural memory there became an active ingredient in defining life in the New South. The culture of segregation that mobilized such memories, and the forgetting that inevitably accompanied them, relied on performance, ritualized choreographies of race and place, and gender and class, in which participants knew their roles and acted them out for each other and for visitors. Among the displays of white southern memory most active during Jim Crow, the Natchez Pilgrimage stands out. Elite white women served as the principal actors in making an imaginative geography that became a bedrock of cultural hegemony based on white supremacy. In order to reconstruct the performances of whiteness in Natchez, Mississippi, and to disentangle the constitutive relationship between race and place, this article makes use of qualitative methods that rely on previously unused archival materials and on ethnographic fieldnotes.

Book Review| August 07 2020 Review: Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, by Charles W. Mills Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, by Charles W. Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 304 pp. $29.95 (paper). ISBN: 9780190245429. Jared Loggins Jared Loggins Brown University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar National Review of Black Politics (2020) 1 (3): 440–443. https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2020.1.3.440 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jared Loggins; Review: Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, by Charles W. Mills. National Review of Black Politics 7 August 2020; 1 (3): 440–443. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2020.1.3.440 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentNational Review of Black Politics Search Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism by Charles W. Mills is a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of philosophical and historical reflection on liberalism as a racial and imperial political philosophy. It joins such recent scholarship as Jennifer Pitts’s A Turn to Empire and Duncan Bell’s Reordering the World in showing that liberalism was far from a tradition sweeping away “the darkness and irrational social hierarchies of the ancien régime.” Much like his hugely influential 1997 work The Racial Contract, Mills’s Black Rights / White Wrongs (henceforth BRWW) contends that race historically penetrates “into liberalism’s descriptive and normative apparatus so as to produce a more-or-less consistent racialized ideology” (xv). Far from celebrating the abstract theoretical principles vivified by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century white male statesmen and intellectuals (and their twentieth-century Anglo-American inheritors), Mills argues that liberalism’s actual track record runs the spectrum from justifying... You do not currently have access to this content.

Terminating White Supremacy: Democracy for All

Black slavery and white racism in the South and the nation, de jure and de facto Jim Crow, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed separate schools, “massive resistance” to it (Klarman, 1994, p. 82), plus racial disparities in educational achievement since 1954, all frame this narrative of black males' quest for higher education. Bondmen were denied literacy and black freemen rarely attended school, much less pursue advanced study, during the antebellum period. Union victory in the Civil War, abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), and Reconstruction marked the rise of not only Negro schools and colleges but also southern share cropping, called “the new slavery” (Du Bois, 1935, p. 715), and epidemic violence against blacks that imposed their disfranchisement and segregation, by laws and customs, until the 1960s. Thus African American males sought collegiate and professional training in a national milieu of white supremacy, which postulated black men's mental and moral inferiority but ignored their widespread poverty, separation, and unequal opportunities. Confined in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), they breached the color-line little by little at white institutions, thereby paving the way for Brown, the civil rights movement, and desegregation. In the second half of the 20th century, HBCUs and the majority-white institutions trained increasing numbers of black male graduates and professionals. By 1980 though, only some 11 percent of young black men had received 4 years of college compared to 25.5 percent of young white men (Jaynes & Williams, 1989). An “achievement gap” was evident and it persists today (Lee, 2002, p. 3), revealing the deep roots of race and class inequality in America. White racism, its legal and extralegal forms, and black aspirations and efforts underlay and continue to fuel black men's drive for higher learning. Over time black men, and certainly women as well, faced racist structures, ideologies, and attitudes born of slavery; sub-citizenship, stereotypes, and terror, among other barriers, through a century of Jim Crow; and after Brown, ongoing discrimination, socioeconomic disadvantages, and ambiguous “affirmative action” policies (Jaynes & Williams, 1989, p. 376).

Traditionally, applied linguistics focused almost entirely on transient and non‐tangible language subjects, such as vocabulary acquisition, skills transfer, and code‐switching. Later, more socially oriented investigations of communities, family, and school settings studied language learners in terms of their linguistic and ethnic background, life trajectories, language attitudes, and motivation. The fascinating world of material culture, things, and artefacts such as buildings and pens, shirts and boxes, doors, and souvenirs is a fairly recent dimension of scholarly interest preceded by studies in the linguistic landscape. Visual signs in public spaces are only a portion of an infinite number of material items integrated into the contemporary multilingual world. Solid, three‐dimensional, multimodal, and indexical, material objects organize and enable our lives, reflect social reality, infer emotions, beliefs, attitudes and values, and, by this, propel and direct activities. Material culture of multilingualism (MCM) is a particular kind of social discourse and a source of awareness about oneself and minority and majority communities. The interdisciplinary field of the MCM merges the two domains of knowledge—multilingualism and material culture. The understanding of the MCM rests on theories integrated from a wide range of disciplines including but not limited to anthropology, ethnology, sociology, linguistics, and cognitive studies, especially the philosophies that reveal the codependency between mind, action, and matter and the inseparability of thought, action, and material things. In education, materialities induce “affective understanding” and are extraordinary tools for language teaching. Material culture objects work as a “shortcut” to multilingual contexts of any scope.

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...

Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South

Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi's Closed Society and One Mississippi, Two Mississippi: Methodists, Murder, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Neshoba County