Rethinking, Revising, Rewriting: An Appeal for Unfinished Scholarship

Rethinking, Revising, Rewriting:An Appeal for Unfinished Scholarship Martha Hodes (bio) IF you're someone who published a scholarly book or article a decade or two ago, when was the last time you reread it? Occasionally, turning the pages of my own long-ago published work, I've found myself wishing I'd selected a different adjective or deleted a repetitive sentence. As historians, our most fulfilling work will alter the historiography in ways small or large. In my "Literature of the Field" graduate seminar on the nineteenth-century United States, I take students through the generational shifts of the scholarship, puzzling out patterns: the questions that drove the field in the 1960s, key arguments historians formulated in the 1990s, or the ways in which scholars are reconsidering well-trodden primary sources in the twenty-first century. As the years elapse, our own work may well be superseded by previously unasked questions, innovative methods, newly unearthed evidence, or novel interpretations. When that happens, how many of us return to our research notes from the past to rethink our method and argument? As Sharon Block writes, "The academic ecosystem is set up for scholarship to be reviewed and critiqued by others, not for self-revision of our own published work."1 Block's "Rewriting the Rape of Rachel" offers a model for reinvigorating [End Page 709] our own past work, research we might have assumed we had finished and were finished with. This endeavor has the potential to add an original dimension to the study and teaching of historiography, as "Rewriting the Rape of Rachel" shows us a senior scholar thinking back on her own pathbreaking contributions to the field of gender and sexuality, with insights gathered from more recent scholarship across a variety of fields. Looking back to her first article, published in 1999, and her first book, published in 2006, Block identifies her necessarily defensive drive to prove the legitimacy of the study of sexuality, and in this way, she inspired me to think about my own first book, published more than twenty-five years ago. I identified with Block's description of writing a monograph built from paragraphs of topic sentences, overflowing with examples and citations. "I did that too!" I murmured, thinking back to the book, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. In one instance, I wrote about two sexual liaisons revealed in freedom lawsuits, backed up by an endnote that referenced six additional such suits. In another spot I listed thirteen "other Maryland cases of fornication and bastardy between white women and black men," while elsewhere I cited twenty-one cases to back up the point that courts could reverse the rape convictions of Black men.2 Heading off critics who might have questioned the occurrence of sex between white women and Black men in the nineteenth-century South, I wrote (necessarily defensively), "My concern is not to point out that sex between white women and black men occurred with a particular frequency. Rather, my concern is to demonstrate that when such liaisons did occur, white Southerners could react in a way that complicates modern assumptions," adding in the endnote (again defensively), "In any event, the argument here does not depend upon frequency."3 This is not to say that the project of accumulating evidence must be jettisoned, for such compilations matter both to the broadening of historical study and to those who wish to interpret untold or fragmented stories. It is, though, to recognize that in Block's analysis, she—and I, despite my own protests—proved legitimacy by prioritizing accumulation. At the same time, Block's revisiting of her earlier scholarship comes with a clarion call for new, more expansive ways to write histories of sexuality. Wishing to explore the meaning of sexual violence for the violated, she sets out to understand Rachel Davis's trauma in a context that reaches beyond the [End Page 710] pronouncements of a local court and allows us to better understand Rachel's life as a whole. Embarking on an investigation of Rachel's life before the rape, as well as her life afterward, Block engages with the art of speculation. Her work...