Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T03:22:55.560Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - The Unfinished Drama of the American Civil War

from Part I - The Blind Ruck of Event

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2022

Kathleen Diffley
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
Coleman Hutchison
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
Get access

Summary

If there was no Civil War drama written during the conflict, there was an active theater culture thriving before, during, and after the war, one represented most clearly in American melodrama. Tracing the particular genealogy of racial melodrama from before the Civil War to the beginnings of Black Lives Matter, this chapter discovers the way in which playwrights have deployed and manipulated melodrama’s black-or-white aesthetic mode both to retrench and to reimagine Black and white racial relations. From sensational melodramas before the war, through conservative ones after it, to radical ones today, racial melodrama has a long genealogy. Recovering this genealogy allows us to witness how the American theater played a crucial role in not only staging this country’s fraught racial relations for audiences, but also inviting these audiences—from the nineteenth century to today—to think and feel differently about the unfinished racial drama of the American Civil War.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×