Democracy’s New Song

• Date: 01 September 2011
• Published date: 01 September 2011
• Author: Marina Bilbija
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716211407153

64 ANNALS, AAPSS, 637, September 2011

W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1935/1998) Black Reconstruction

in America, 1860 –1880 is commonly regarded as the

foundational text of revisionist African American histo-

riography. But Black Reconstruction did more than cor-

rect the historical record, it also interrogated the very

limits of historiography—what it can communicate, and

what and who its “appropriate” subjects should be.

Drawing on Susan Gillman’s concept of race melo-

drama as the dominant framework for late-nineteenth-

and early-twentieth-century racial thinking, this article

posits Black Reconstruction as a race melodrama par

excellence, with special emphasis on the text’s strate-

gic inv ocations of music in emotionally and spiritually

charged moments. To this end, it traces Du Bois’s use

of song, scenes of singing, librettos, and lyrics as both an

affective and de-familiarizing device through which he

is able to yoke the former slaves’ messianic/religious

experience of freedom and their understanding of

democracy.

Keywords: W. E. B. Du Bois; melodrama; music;

occult history; democracy; religion; race

Yoking Religion, Democracy,

and Humanity in Black

Reconstruction in America,

1860–1880

Easily the most dramatic episode in American

history was the sudden move to free four million

black slaves in an effort to stop a civil war, to end

forty years of bitter controversy, and to appease

the moral sense of civilization.

—W. E. B. DuBois (1935/1998)

Thus opens Black Reconstruction in America,

1860–1880 (1935/1998), the first comprehensive

revisionist history of the American Civil War

and its aftermath. Du Bois’s opening sentence

Democracy’s

New Song:

Black

Reconstruction

in America,

1860–1880

and the

Melodramatic

Imagination

By

MARINA BILBIJA

Marina Bilbija is a doctoral student in English literature

and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Her research focuses on nineteenth-century and early-

twentieth-century utopian writing of the black Atlantic,

didacticism, and historiography.

DOI: 10.1177/0002716211407153