Academic Sarah Churchwell demonstrates that the American Civil War never really ended. American academic Sarah Churchwell has taken the interesting route of trying to explain Donald Trump's dominance of US politics by examining the text of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind. UK based, Churchwell is a professor at the University of London, perhaps giving her enough distance to form a clearer view of American culture, history and racial issues. After being asked so many times why the American people had chosen Trump, she wrote The Wrath to Come in response. Her argument can be put in Shakespearean terms: the past is prologue. The American Civil War never really did solve issues of race, slavery and the South's financial dependence on cheap Black labour. In reviewing both the novel and the famous film adaptation, Churchwell finds a narrative of white victimhood and self-pity. Slavery was not that bad, the majority of whites believed, and it was only the Northern incursion into the South that brought problems. Everything was fine before then. Slaves were mostly satisfied with their lot, whites believed. Hence the utter shock when the enslaved were set free: their white oppressors couldn't believe they wanted to leave. What makes this denial even more extraordinary is the public nature of lynchings. Thousands turned up to watch these grotesque spectacles that involved mutilation and dismemberment before death, then the scrambling for body parts as souvenirs afterwards. How could whites not realise that Black people would be rightly terrified? And yet Southern white people continued to paint a picture of themselves as a civilised and gracious community. The Wrath to Come (the title is a quote from James Baldwin, a euphemism for white rage) interweaves history with literary criticism. Churchwell contrasts Gone With the Wind's' timeline against the actual historical record, throwing into relief the text's underlying racism and wilful ignorance. A difficult and disturbing read that does make sense of today's American white supremacism. It also provides a template of white denialism that could be transplanted to many countries around the world, Australia included. The Wrath to Come, by Sarah Churchwell. Published by Apollo. $39.99 Review by Chris Saliba Comments are closed.
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