Black Reconstructions: Introduction Eric Gardner; Part I. Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities: 1. Sketching Black Citizenship on Installment after the 15th Amendment Derrick R. Spires; 2. Stories of Citizenship: The Rise of Narrative Black Poetry During Reconstruction Stephanie Farrar; 3. National Housekeeping: (Re)dressing the Politics of Whiteness in Nineteenth-Century African American Literary History Rynetta Davis; 4. Reconstructing the Rhetoric of AME Ministry Eric Gardner; Part II. Persons and Bodies: 5. Black Reform, Writing, and Resistance: Textual Politics in the Post-War Era Kathy L. Glass; 6. Post-Civil War Black Childhoods Nazera Sadiq Wright; 7. Disabling Freedom: Bloody Shirt Rhetoric in Postbellum Slave Narratives Keith Michael Green; 8. Radical Respectability and African American Women's Reconstruction Fiction Brigitte Fielder; Part III. Memories, Materialities, and Locations: 9. The Civil War in African American Memory Cody Marrs; 10. African American Literature of the West and the Landscape of Opportunity Janet Neary; 11. Reconstructions of the South in African American Literature Sherita L. Johnson; 12. 'This Is Especially Our Crop': Blackness, Value, and the Reconstruction of Cotton Katherine Adams.

This book provides the richest study available of African American literature during the years immediately following the Civil War.