In the final chapter of his landmark revisionist study Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois referred to Reconstruction as “a tragedy that beggared the Greek.”1 He explains, “The unending tragedy of Reconstruction is the utter inability of the American mind to grasp its real significance, its national and worldwide implications” (708). In thus naming Reconstruction a tragedy, Du Bois collapses the distinction between literary genre and social experience. This notion of tragedy, or more precisely tragic thinking (given Du Bois’ heterodox use of the term) resembles most closely what anthropologist David Scott means by the concept in his compelling reading of C. L. R. James’ Black Jacobins (1938, revised 1963), a landmark text in the anticolonial historiography of the Haitian Revolution. For Scott, tragic thinking serves a dual role. As an analytic, tragedy functions as a mode of historical criticism, and as a narrative...
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Spring 2023
Issue Editors
Research Article|
April 01 2023
Citation
Edlie Wong; Our Splendid Failure. American Literary Realism 1 April 2023; 55 (3): 261–270. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/19405103.55.3.08
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