The Confederate nation was always an exercise in imagination. Southern nationalists, including Confederates and antebellum authors, viewed literature as integral to the project of nation-building. Just as the Confederacy would build its own world around the socio-economic system that defined the region—slavery—early southern nationalist and later Confederate novels speculated about a separate reality that fed into proslavery southerners’ understandings of themselves and their culture. This chapter explores the role of southern nationalist fiction in creating and sustaining an idea of the Confederacy from the antebellum period through the Civil War, using the example of novels and short fiction by authors such as Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, Augusta Jane Evans, and Richard Malcolm Johnston.

We explore the inherently racialized premises of colonial–national modernity and of imperial and national archaeologies, juxtaposing them with the contradictions and fluidity inherent in “Greek” and “Israeli” identities. This is followed by a brief critique of the reductionist, and often self-serving, roll-out of ancient DNA studies and of their political co-optation.

The United States Civil War, and the resulting end of slavery on the North American continent, reverberated throughout the Caribbean and in its political writing. This essay first examines how how both pro- and and anti-slavery activists interpreted the Civil War in the Spanish Empire and used its example to defend or attack slavery. Next, it describes how the war led to widespread protest of the conditions of post-emancipation Jamaica and, eventually, led to the Morant Bay rebellion.