Black Reconstructions: Introduction

Summary

The Introduction to Black Reconstructions gives a basic description of the volume, which offers the most nuanced treatment currently available of Black print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It articulates both the kinds of recovery work and methodological innovations in the book and demonstrates how the recovery work inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. It recognizes that many period texts – by writers from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to Mattie Jackson – are not only aesthetically striking but also central to understanding key trends in American culture. It describes the book’s three parts – “Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities”; “Persons and Bodies”; and “Memories, Materialities, and Locations.” It places all of this work in dialogue with key scholarship, especially that flowing from W. E. B. Du Bois’s massively important Black Reconstruction in America (1935).