The Tragic Era Reconsidered

In the early twentieth century, tragedy was a concept readily embraced by the former Confederacy and transported to the description of African American losses with the failure of Reconstruction (think William Archibald Dunning... [ view full abstract ]

In the early twentieth century, tragedy was a concept readily embraced by the former Confederacy and transported to the description of African American losses with the failure of Reconstruction (think William Archibald Dunning on one hand, W.E.B. DuBois on the other). Erica Stevens returns to the so-called “Tragic Era” of post-bellum America to expose how the label of tragedy can engulf and disguise political progress. Attending in particular to Jean-Charles Houzeau’s 1870 My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune, which was written well before the tragic narrative shored up white supremacist nostalgia, Stevens asks what is gained by abandoning tragedy as a key word in histories of Reconstruction. Thus the roundtable ends with the need to rethink tragic conceptions of Reconstruction and the need to reframe, or reclaim, the tragic from neo-Confederate actors determined to revivify the tragic in white supremacist terms.