Resisting an Inglorious Forgetting: Imperium in Imperio’s Speculative Recollection in an Amnestic Nation’s Persistent Old South

In the wake of the Civil War, the narrative of the American South became a palimpsest of white recollection and Black erasure. As Reconstruction ended and a rhetoric of sectional reconciliation became a national priority in literature, history, celebration and commemoration, white memory dismissed, disavowed, and even violently dismantled Black recollection conflicting with an ‘Official National Narrative’, whose purpose was ever-changing. As reconciliation and time shaped Civil War nostalgia, soldiers’ recollections and annual encampments gave way to popular fictions and world’s fairs that emboldened the discourse of Lost Cause sentimentalism for the Old South within the national narrative. It is against these political and rhetorical manipulations, that I place Sutton E. Griggs’s speculative utopia Imperium in Imperio (1899). I examine the novel as the work of an acutely shrewd and observant student of the amnestic culture of reconciliation taking shape after the Civil War. I argue that Griggs, a child during Reconstruction and its demise, deftly uses speculation to interrogate, unsettle, and intervene in the meaning and recollection of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and sectional reconciliation for Black and white Americans at the century’s end.