Epilogue

On June 27, 2015, ten days after the massacre at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Claudia Rankine published an essay on black loss in the New York Times’ Sunday magazine: “the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering,” Rankine writes; yet “[w]e live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here.”...

Campus Novels, Camaraderie, and White Nationalist Merriment

Chapter 1 highlights the significance of everyday social practices for white sectional reunion after the Civil War, reassessing the form assumed by reconciliation as it transitioned from an object of political contestation to common sense reality. Specifically, it recovers the campus novel, a popular though largely unstudied genre that, despite its sophomoric content, acquired historical weight by turning the practice of campus affections into a metonym for national belonging tacitly predicated on racial exclusion. Focusing on the ability for merriment to overcome and, above all, trivialize intra-white difference, novels like Hammersmith: His Harvard Days (1879) and For the Blue and Gold (1901) enacted a civic pedagogy, becoming handbooks for a sociality that turned political disagreement into jocular affinity, dispute into banter, and racial exclusion into an implicit element of white fellow feeling.

The Ladies’ Home Journal, Sororal Publics, and the Wages of White Womanhood

Chapter 2 argues that the Ladies’ Home Journal fashioned white women’s culture as a mediating force for racial sorority—an imagined sisterhood that provided the comforting sense of familiarity across distance—while also responding to a perceived crisis in women’s intimate friendship by providing detailed guidance for befriending. I argue that both scales of white social practice (sorority and intimate friendship) attached white women’s social forms to antiblackness. On the one hand, the Journal infused its imagined sisterhood with a deep sense of white supremacy (through frequent use of racist humor, for instance), providing white women a compensation that at least partially made up for the harms produced by gender inequality. On the other hand, by revitalizing intraracial friendship as a necessary departure from antiseptic social life, the Journal engaged an Aristotelian politics of friendship in which the precondition for befriending (whiteness) naturalized itself as the precondition for citizenship.

Introduction

Writing in 1891, Reverend Albery Allson Whitman, known during his lifetime as “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race,” delivered a blunt assessment: emancipation had failed.1 Delineating the contributing factors, he describes a newly vibrant white nationalism organized through “the common heritage of the Blue and the Gray,” scenes of “[m]utual admiration” between former white enemies, “bonds of Anglo-Saxon brotherhood,” and an invigorated racial capitalism in which industrialists “of the Atlantic seaboard will do nothing to unsettle the labor on the plantations.” First observing that “[s]trife between the white people is at an end,” Whitman then wryly concludes: “Profitable industry is a great peace-maker.”...

Gospel Sermons, Christian Fellowship, and the Conventions of Freedom

Chapter 4 tracks how black Protestants developed and spread what arguably became the first genre of African American popular literature, the gospel sermon. This genre enabled worshipers to experience a form of collective belonging founded not upon a fraternal model of a priori sameness, but instead upon a provisional model that refused alignment into stable axes of affiliation. So doing, gospel sermons enacted forms of freedom and community unimaginable within the terms provided by white supremacist logic. By assembling a broad range of materials that touch upon homiletic experience, this chapter highlights a mode of generic black aesthetics that resists the very terms available for political dissent, a mode not dependent on an interracial liberal politics through which African Americans gain increasing access to previously white civic spaces.

Elegies, White Dissent, and the Civil War Dead

American literary history tends to discount Civil War elegies as unvaryingly predictable and, with a few canonical exceptions, unworthy of sustained attention. Chapter 3 proposes instead that we reconsider the genre as an essential archive of white plasticity and incorporation. When considered together, the hundreds of elegies to the Civil War dead printed and reprinted between 1861 and the turn of the century constitute perhaps the best archive we have for assessing, first, the conflicted nature of Northern white feeling in response to sectional reconciliation and, second, the capacity for white nationalism to transform such dissent into a technology for supremacist belonging. As a genre, Civil War elegies thus organized those psychic, social, and political incorporations that enabled the white subject to assert misrecognition without disrupting belonging, dissent from nationalism’s projections without disrupting citizenship, and occupy several competing strands of attachment without disrupting white supremacy’s defining claim to racial exceptionalism.