"Davis demonstrates how dominant historical narratives, performances, and institutions can privilege certain interests and interpretations, obscure invisible ideologies and hidden agendas, and promote negligent narratives about the past. Davis uses interviews, participant observation, textual analysis, and archival research to discern white norms of southern identity; identify erroneous accounts of the Civil War; illustrate the importance of African American southern heritage—a heritage that has often been intentionally ignored, denied, and 'symbolically annihilated'; show how African Americans have actively reclaimed forgotten experiences; and demonstrate how Civil War reenactments by organizations such as United States Colored Troops, museums such as the African American Civil War Museum, and digital repositories such as the Memory Book project contest inaccurate, careless, and white legacies of the south. Although the presence of particular stories can cultivate group pride and solidarity, Davis cautions against cultural syncretism and triumphant narratives, both of which can obscure the tragic lived realities of the past. With such impressive breadth and depth, this book is essential for anyone interested in rhetoric, race, activism, and cultural heritage. Highly recommended."
—CHOICE
“To say that Laying Claim is a timely work of rhetorical theory and criticism and leave it at that runs the risk of downplaying the value of Davis’ exigent intervention in multiple scholarly fields. Laying Claim is a rigorous exploration of the historic, cultural, and rhetorical forces that facilitate the emergence of black southern identities in the twenty-first century.”
—Quarterly Journal of Speech
“Laying Claim is Davis’s first book, and it is a welcome addition to critical studies of memory, southern identity, and race and representation. Readers familiar with Blight s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) or Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished War (1999) will no doubt be interested in Davis’s account of a region still trying to come to terms with its tragic past.”
—North Carolina Historical Review
"A provocative and timely work that contributes something new to our understanding of both Civil War memory and the evolution of African American identity."
—Craig A. Warren, author of The Rebel Yell: A Cultural History
"Laying Claim makes several important contributions to the study of African American history and rhetoric, most notably its exploration of the ways in which African Americans in the south are reclaiming and redefining their role in southern history. This is an important work that offers a unique and compelling argument for the rethinking of southern identity."
—Mark Lawrence McPhail, author of The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited: Reparations or Separation?
