Reading Confederate Monuments

This collection of essays written by literary and cultural critics addresses the urgent and vital need for scholars, educators, and the general public to be able to read and interpret literal and cultural Confederate monuments pervading life in the contemporary United States. Engaging many different archives and methods, the essays in this collection instruct readers in how to read literal Confederate monuments as texts and in the context of the assortment of texts that produced and celebrated them. But they also illustrate how to read the literary texts that have advanced and contested Civil War memory in the US cultural imaginary-then and now-as monuments in and of themselves. Finally, these essays lay bare the cultural and pedagogical work of Confederate monuments and counter-monuments-how and what they teach their readers as communal and yet contested narratives of white supremacy and white nationalism-showing why the persistence of Confederate monuments matters greatly to local and national notions of racial justice and belonging.