On Their Shoulders We Stand: Civil War Battle Reenactments as Black Spatial Reimagining

African American Civil War battle reenactments serve many functions, most of which extend beyond the pleasure involved in gunplay to encompass the more overtly political project of revising dominant historical narratives centered on the war, its causes and consequences, and its contemporary legacies. One of the more intriguing revisions it produces involves changing the place meanings of the battlefield and those of the surrounding landscapes. In re-centering memories of the war, they represent a discursive shift away from traditional reenactment’s focus on blood sacrifice in the service of “protection of hearth and home,” “states’ rights,” and other constructions toward the emancipation of Black women, men, and children. These shifts result in a reordering of the place meanings of the battlefield in a way that centers African American history and African spiritual expressions. In this chapter, I argue that one of the primary functions of Black-centered reenactments lies in the contestation of the traditional meanings assigned to a Civil War battlefield and also that the interjections of African- and African American-centered cultural expressions reorder the conceptualization of the battlefield as “sacred ground.”