Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity

Abstract

The version of Civil War history that I learned as an elementary schooler in middle Tennessee went something like this: white men from the North fought to preserve the Union and white men from the South fought to protect “states’ rights.” Both sides fought honorably in defense of noble causes, but, because of the region’s industrial might, the North eventually won. In school, the conflict was framed as a tragic mistake, one that could have been avoided if the Confederacy had been left alone. Conspicuously missing from this version of the Civil War is the history of slavery in the United States. In this retelling, the millions of African Americans who struggled to secure their freedom both during and after the conflict are completely overlooked. My elementary school introduction to Civil War history is not unique and is certainly not confined to the southeastern portion of the United States – a Pennsylvanian recently told me that “the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.” Put plainly, dominant memories of the Civil War actively obscure the historical agency of black communities, especially black southerners. In Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity, Patricia G. Davis examines how blackness and southernness are co-constructed through memories of the Civil War. Building from the well-established premise that practices and places of public memory shape group identities, Davis argues that reconciliationist narratives in popular culture firmly equate southernness with whiteness (8–9). Take the South’s commemorative architecture, for instance; the hundreds of Confederate monuments standing on public property have “rendered the region’s memorial landscape both a symbolic and material paean to southern whiteness” (7). From antebellum plantation tours to The Dukes of Hazzard, conventional Civil War memories stress whiteness as benevolent and normative, while blackness operates as a foil: “servile, one-dimensional, hidden in the background, and silenced” (150). Yet, as Davis painstakingly demonstrates throughout Laying Claim, dissonant memories of the Civil War can challenge hegemonic narratives that mark southernness as essentially white. This, in fact, is Davis’ central argument: “there is a form of African American identification with the South centered on Civil War memory, and... this sense of belonging to the region is most productively constructed and articulated through a variety of vernacular cultural practices” (4). By examining resistant performances of Civil War memory, Davis reveals that southern identity is not monolithically white, nor is it necessarily tethered to the geographic region. Instead, twenty-first-century southernness is characterized “by the emergence of fluid, decentered, and fragmented identities” (150, emphasis in original). While there are multiple reasons for this change, not the least of which is the South’s rapidly shifting demography, Laying Claim focuses principally on the vernacular histories of African American communities in the South. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork at Civil War sites and interviews with vernacular historians, Davis organizes Laying Claim around five central questions: