• The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay, MATC 2019Reinventing Reconstruction and Scripting Civil Rights in Theodore Ward’s Our Lan’
• Julie Burrell (bio)

On February 23, 1968, in what would be one of his final public addresses, Martin Luther King Jr. paid tribute to the life and work of W. E. B. Du Bois as part of a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Du Bois’s birth. In the speech at Carnegie Hall, King distinguished Du Bois’s work as a historian, selecting for special praise the monumental work of historical revisionism, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), which helped overturn nearly a century of white supremacist histories. Such histories, King declared, were responsible for “a conscious and deliberate manipulation of history and the stakes were high.” King insisted that the stakes of misremembering and misconstruing African Americans’ role in the drama of Reconstruction was the perpetuation of Jim Crow: “If, as white historians tell it, Negroes wallowed in corruption, opportunism, displayed spectacular stupidity, were wanton, evil, and ignorant, their case was made. They would have proved that freedom was dangerous in the hands of inferior beings.”¹

Two decades before King’s Carnegie Hall speech, African American playwright Theodore Ward had argued that the continued success or failure of the civil rights movement depended in no small part on the nation’s memory of the first Reconstruction. Ward’s underappreciated masterpiece Our Lan’ was first performed in 1947, initially at the Lower East Side’s Henry Street Settlement House, before becoming one of the few African American–authored dramas to reach Broadway in the first half of the twentieth century. Our Lan’ depicts a group of recently freed African Americans claiming their forty acres and a [End Page 215] mule on a disused cotton plantation. In the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and changing federal policies that were more sympathetic to white former landowners, the freedpeople stage a doomed rebellion in an attempt to keep their land. Ward began composing Our Lan’ in the early 1940s, soon after the film version of Gone with the Wind (1939) had reinforced white supremacist narratives that depicted Reconstruction as a time of farcical yet tyrannical rule over the South by black people and white Northerners. Our Lan’ was part of an upsurge of black-authored, counter-hegemonic cultural texts combatting stage and screen distortions of the era that treated black men as ignorant buffoons or dangerous beasts and portrayed black women predominantly through the sentimental trope of the mammy. Like Ward, African American playwrights including William Branch, Theodore Browne, Alice Childress, Ossie Davis, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Lorraine Hansberry, Robert Hayden, and Langston Hughes reworked black folk culture and revised popular accounts of the past in an attempt to wrest control of black historical representation away from white supremacists.

Moreover, Ward is one of the foremost writers of the civil rights era to suggest that Reconstruction ushered in a re-entrenchment of slavery maintained by white supremacist tactics such as sharecropping and state violence. Ward frames Reconstruction as “the nonevent of emancipation,” Saidiya Hartman’s term for “the perpetuation of the plantation system and the refiguration of subjection.”² Our Lan’ invites us to consider how “the afterlives of Reconstruction” endure beyond the supposed end point of Reconstruction and align with a broad strand of African American thought that is fundamentally at odds with an imagined break between slavery and freedom called emancipation.³ Recent studies such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name, as well as the black feminists and activists of the Black Lives Matter and prison abolition movements, have contended that structures of domination have been refigured through chain-gang labor and imprisonment, legal restrictions and Black Codes, and the spectacular terrorism effected through white Americans’ violence against black Americans, including lynchings and police killings. Black emancipatory discourse has frequently resisted the idea of freedom as a fixed point or historical event; the lyrics to “Freedom Is Constant Struggle,” performed during civil rights protests by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee-affiliated Freedom Singers, captures this fittingly: “They say that freedom is a constant struggle / O Lord, we...

• 罗伯特·尚克（Robert A.Schanke）获奖论文，MATC 2019在西奥多·沃德（Theodore Ward）的《我们的兰》中重塑了重构和脚本化的民权
• 朱莉·伯瑞（Julie Burrell）（生物）

1968年2月23日，小马丁·路德·金（Martin Luther King Jr.）在他的最后一次公开讲话中，对杜波依斯（WEB Du Bois）的生活和工作表示敬意，以此庆祝杜波依斯诞辰100周年。在卡内基音乐厅的演讲中，国王表彰了杜波依斯作为历史学家的作品，并特别赞扬了历史修正主义的伟大著作《美国黑人重建》。（1935），这有助于推翻近一个世纪的白人至上主义历史。金宣称，这样的历史是“有意识地，故意地操纵历史，并且风险很高的原因。” 金坚持认为，误解和误解非裔美国人在重建戏剧中的作用是吉姆·克罗（Jim Crow）的永存。无知，他们的案子提出了。他们本来会证明，在次等人的手中，自由是危险的。” ^1个

在金卡内基音乐厅演讲之前的二十年，非洲裔美国剧作家西奥多·沃德（Theodore Ward）辩称，民权运动的持续成败很大程度上取决于该国对第一次重建的记忆。沃德被低估的杰作《我们的兰》在1947年首次演出，最初是在下东城的亨利街安置所演出，后来成为20世纪上半叶在百老汇上映的少数几部由非洲裔美国人创作的戏剧之一。我们的Lan'描绘了一群刚刚获释的非裔美国人，他们声称拥有40英亩土地，[End Page 215]废弃棉花种植园上的子。在亚伯拉罕·林肯（Abraham Lincoln）被暗杀和不断变化的联邦政策（这些政策更同情白人前地主）之后，自由主义者发动了注定的叛乱，试图保住自己的土地。沃德（Ward ）于1940年代初开始创作《我们的Lan'》，电影版《飘》（1939）加强了白人至上主义者的叙述，此后的叙述将重建视为黑人和白人北方人对南方的讽刺性但专横的统治时期。我们的兰这是黑人创作，反霸权文化文字的高潮的一部分，该文字文字与那个时代将舞台黑人和黑人视为愚昧的小丑或危险的野兽并主要通过黑人的感性描写来描绘黑人妇女的时代的舞台和银幕扭曲有关。像沃德一样，非裔美国剧作家包括威廉·布兰克，西奥多·布朗，艾丽丝·Childress，奥西·戴维斯，雪莉·格雷厄姆·杜波依斯，洛林·汉斯伯里，罗伯特·海登和兰斯顿·休斯，他们重新设计了黑人民间文化，并修改了过去的流行说法，试图夺取控制权。白人至上主义者的黑人历史表现形式。

此外，沃德是民权时代最重要的作家之一，他认为重建工作通过白人至上主义策略（如裁剪和国家暴力）重新巩固了奴隶制。沃德将重建视为“解放的非事件”，这是赛迪亚·哈特曼（Saidiya Hartman）的术语，意为“种植系统的永久存在和臣服的变相”。² 我们的《论语》邀请我们考虑“重建的余生”如何在预期的重建终点之外持续，并与广泛的非裔美国人思想保持一致，这在根本上与奴隶制和自由之间的想象中的突破（称为解放）背道而驰。³最近的研究，例如米歇尔·亚历山大（Michelle Alexander）的《新吉姆·乌鸦（The New Jim Crow）》道格拉斯·A·布莱克蒙的《奴隶制的别称》，以及黑人生活问题和废除奴隶运动的黑人女权主义者和激进主义者，都声称，通过连锁帮派劳动和监禁，法律限制和《黑人法典》已经改变了统治结构。 ，而壮观的恐怖主义是由于美国白人针对黑人美国人的暴力行为所致，其中包括私刑和杀害警察。黑人解放性话语经常抵制自由作为定点或历史事件的观念。学生非暴力协调委员会下属的自由歌手在民权抗议期间演唱的“自由是不断的斗争”的歌词恰好抓住了这一点：“他们说自由是不断的斗争/主啊，我们...