This chapter examines contemporary and emerging developments in the literatures of the Civil War and Reconstruction. It argues that two particular genres have recently taken root: stories about people previously overlooked by mainstream accounts of the era; and stories that approach the Civil War and Reconstruction as a source of philosophical meaning. The chapter explores the major iterations of these burgeoning genres and documents their ongoing evolution in texts such as George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Kasi Lemmons’s Harriet, Gary Ross’s Free State of Jones, and James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird.

Streeter’s chapter examines mixed-race life narratives that emerged in significant numbers in the mid-nineteen nineties and continues in the present time. Streeter contends these mixed-race narratives are a publishing trend begun after a distinct cultural turn in the nineteen-nineties, when the first generation of what she names post-Loving children, born just before and after interracial marriage became legal in 1967. The chapter focuses on black and white race mixture because, among the book-length life narratives investigating racially mixed ancestries and articulating mixed identities, most are authored from that perspective. Blackness and mixed-ness are, at the most fundamental level, overlapping discourses of identity in the United States. The fear of and fascination with race mixture between white people and Black people is a distinctly US American cultural trope. The color line – a tool of separation - and the one-drop rule – a deeply ambiguous barometer of Blackness – are contradictory imperatives. Under these circumstances, Streeter contends, dichotomy becomes the repetitive mode appending attempts to pin down intrinsic Blackness as articulated in mixed-race life writing.