7 - The Unfinished Drama of the American Civil War

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.