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Book Review
| The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory. By W. Fitzhugh Brundage. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2005. xiv, 418 pp. Cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-674-01876-1.)
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| The Southern Past begins with an analysis of how the white South established its memory of the Civil War. In the first decades after Appomattox, W. Fitzhugh Brundage argues, "by crafting public memory, white women claimed for themselves the work of recording and narrating the progress of civilization, thereby laying claim to a new source of cultural authority" (p. 16). Committed to "white power and civilization," they constructed a version of the past that intertwined gender, race, and the ideal of civilization (p. 35). Brundage follows his account of the creation of white southerners' memory of the war with a discussion of how southern blacks established a contrasting memory. During Reconstruction, Brundage shows, they held parades that displayed a respectable black community and demonstrated African American manhood. After whites regained control of politics, black celebrations continued, though in less public spaces, and recounted the horrors of bondage and interpreted the war as punishment for the sin of slavery. They also provided an occasion to attack "white hubris" (p. 91), to question reigning notions of "civilization," and to promote national regeneration and racial change. In exploring the conflict between white and black memories of the Civil War, Brundage's analysis does not differ dramatically from that of David W. Blight, William A. Blair, and Kathleen Ann Clark; in emphasizing the role of white women, it parallels the work of LeeAnn Whites, Anastasia Sims, Karen L. Cox, and others. His first two chapters, therefore, build on the reigning interpretation of Civil War memory. |
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In making the Confederacy "the crucible of southern identity" and treating white heritage and southern identity as synonymous, Brundage argues, southern whites have tried to justify white privilege and supremacy (p. 2). Brundage, in what becomes the book's central theme, instead stresses the importance of slavery and emancipation and the subsequent contest over versions of the region's past. The contest has rarely been an equal one. Brundage shows how the power held by whites, particularly their control of public space—where, he argues, memory is sustained—has allowed whites to marginalize, if not ignore, blacks' view of the past and their role as southerners. By juxtaposing chapters on white and black memory, as he does in the first two chapters and in two additional pairs of chapters that take his discussion of southern memory to the present, Brundage builds into the structure of his book the clash of race and memory. |
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