“A Nation Under Our Feet” – Questions for Discussion

I thought I would try something new and create questions that cater to some of the specific interests of the class (or more accurately, what I perceive some of your interests to be, and please forgive me if I am wrong). While I address specific people with some of the questions, I intend to start a discussion that we can all join based on our previous conversations and readings, and not limit this to the individuals named. And you of course have the right to reject these invitations 🙂

1. Hahn’s study more or less obliterates the traditional temporal boundaries of periodization for American historiography, using a nuanced and sustained argument to plow through the Antebellum era, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration. In your view, what were the strengths and limitations of this approach?

2. A central argument of the book is “that African-Americans in the rural South contributed to the making of a new political nation while they made themselves into a new people – a veritable nation as many of them came to understand it” (Hahn 9). Did “African-Americans in the rural South” constitute a nation? Why or why not? If so, how was this nation constructed?

3. Do you find Hahn’s take on the Civil War and Reconstruction as “a massive social and political revolution” and “the largest slave rebellion in modern history” (7) convincing? Why or why not?

Cara: Considering your course this semester on comparative revolutions with Prof. Caldwell, would you consider the Civil War and Reconstruction a “massive social and political revolution” after reading Hahn’s book? Does your class utilize any particular definition of what qualifies as a “revolution”?

Wes: How does Hahn’s approach and argument differ from W.E.B. DuBois’ much earlier Black Reconstruction, which also emphasized black self-organization and explored Reconstruction as a revolutionary endeavor?

4. Hahn uses the term “grassroots emigrationism” to describe how black emigration from the south was a conscious, collective action taken in response to increasing expressions of white supremacy and its institutionalization. Did you find Hahn’s take on this convincing, or does he overemphasize freedpeople’s “agency” at the expense of “structure,” such as political economy or the agency of the white supremacists?

Suraya: Have you encountered other works that use a similar framework for conceptualizing mass migration? If so, how have they been received?

5. In consideration of what appears to be “the question of the semester,” how does A Nation Under Our Feet stack up against Walter Johnson’s seminal call to transcend the New Social History approach of “giving the slaves back their agency”?

Important points to consider:

The original inspiration from Karl Marx in “The 18th Brumaire”: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

“…cultural autonomy has been seen as in-and-of-itself a form of resistance to slavery, without careful attention to the ways that it could undermine as well as facilitate the formation of political solidarities among slaves” (Johnson 118).

“To put this another way: the term ‘agency’ smuggles a notion of the universality of a liberal notion of selfhood, with its emphasis on independence and choice, right into the middle of a conversation about slavery against which that supposedly natural (at least for white men) condition was originally defined. By applying the jargon of self-determination and choice to the historical condition of civil objectification and choicelessness, historians have, not surprisingly, ended up in a mess” (Johnson 115).

“History after ‘agency’ might be written around a ‘Copernican revolution’ of memory, an intellectual inversion of the relation of past and present, by focusing attention on the present-life of the past, on what elements of the past are drawn upon at any given moment in history and the power-structured processes though which they are selected and enforced” (Johnson 119).

“If we are to draw credibility by doing our work in the name of the enslaved and then seek to discharge our debt to their history by simply ‘giving them back their agency’ as paid in the coin of a better history, some knowing laughter, and a few ironic asides about the moral idiocy and contradictory philosophy of slaveholders, then I think that we must admit we are practicing therapy rather than politics: we are using our work to make ourselves feel better and more righteous rather than to make the world better or more righteous” (Johnson 121).