The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States - Hardcover

Spires, Derrick R.

 
9780812250800: The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 081225080X ISBN 13: 9780812250800
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does.

In The Practice of Citizenship, Derrick R. Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. Between these two points he recovers understudied figures such as William J. Wilson, whose 1859 "Afric-American Picture Gallery" appeared in seven installments in The Anglo-African Magazine, and the physician, abolitionist, and essayist James McCune Smith. He places texts such as the proceedings of black state conventions alongside considerations of canonical figures such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Frederick Douglass.

Reading black print culture as a space where citizenship was both theorized and practiced, Spires reveals the degree to which concepts of black citizenship emerged through a highly creative and diverse community of letters, not easily reducible to representative figures or genres. From petitions to Congress to Frances Harper's parlor fiction, black writers framed citizenship both explicitly and implicitly, the book demonstrates, not simply as a response to white supremacy but as a matter of course in the shaping of their own communities and in meeting their own political, social, and cultural needs.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Derrick R. Spires is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University.

Derrick R. Spires is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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Introduction
Black Theorizing: Reimagining a "Beautiful but Baneful Object"

Fellow Citizens

This book is about the questions and methodologies that emerge when we focus our analyses on the concerns black writers made foremost and on understanding these concerns in the terms they set forth. When we approach early black writing through a print culture made up of pamphlets, poems, sketches, orations, appeals, treatises, convention proceedings, letters, mastheads, gift books, petitions, autobiographies, and a host of other kinds of documents by black individuals and collectives, citizenship quickly emerges as a key term and vexed concept. A perusal of Dorothy Porter's touchstone Early Negro Writings (1971) reveals a collection of addresses on the abolition of the slave trade from 1808 to 1815 that begin, "Fathers, Brethren, and Fellow Citizens," or simply, "Citizens." Martin R. Delany dedicates Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People in the United States (1852) "to the American People, North and South. By Their Most Devout, and Patriotic Fellow Citizen, the Author"; Frederick Douglass addresses his July 5th "Oration" to "fellow citizens," even as he positions himself outside the "nation"; and many of the collective addresses black citizens issued to various publics through colored conventions were addressed to "fellow citizens." Even texts that did not argue for citizenship in the United States provide productive analyses about citizenship more broadly—what it was in the moment and what it could become. "Citizen," as the 1854 National Emigration Convention put it, was "a term desired and ever cherished" throughout early black America. While this convention argued explicitly for emigration, it nonetheless made useful claims about the meaning of citizenship, perhaps more so because it highlighted its abrogation for black Americans.

These explicit and implicit invocations of citizenship throughout early black print culture suggest that citizenship was a potent concept. Yet, it is still one of the most understudied by critics of early African American literature. It's not that scholars haven't taken up questions of black citizenship—that is, whether or not black Americans were U.S. citizens, legal persons, or humans before the law; the ways they made the case for their citizenship; and the multiform ways (local and national; cultural, economic, and political) that white Americans made clear their refusal to recognize black Americans as equal citizens, if citizens at all. These questions have been ably taken up and will continue to be important points of analysis. Yet, while scholars continue to recover histories of citizenship that document and analyze black activism and trace processes of racial ascription and white supremacy, we have yet to describe the degree to which black writers themselves conceptualized and transformed the meaning of citizenship in the early republic. Even when studies have taken up black theoretical work, they tend to focus on Frederick Douglass's writing or conflicts between Douglass and other men (Henry Highland Garnet and Martin Delany prominent among them). Overemphasizing Douglass flattens out a vibrant intellectual network of newspaper correspondents, convention goers, pamphleteers, and artists, whose key texts and forms were more often than not generated collectively. Hence, this book demonstrates the communal facets of citizenship discourse in black print culture to show that individuals and collectives were both critical to theorizing and practicing citizenship. What I demonstrate in this book stems from answering the following key questions: What happens to our thinking about citizenship if, instead of reading black writers as reacting to or a presence in a largely white-defined discourse, we base our working definitions of citizenship on black writers' proactive attempts to describe their own political work? What happens when we base our working definition of citizenship on black writers' texts written explicitly to and for black communities?

The proliferation of the phrase "fellow citizen" was more than a rhetorical device or ironic signifying. The Practice of Citizenship tells a story about how black writers theorized and practiced citizenship in the early United States through a robust print culture. It insists on exploring citizenship not just from the perspective of law and its framing of black people and others but also from the perspective of black Americans, who were some of the most important theorists of citizenship, both then and now. Yes, the texts I analyze here argue for black citizenship, but the citizenship for which they argue is not the same citizenship from which black Americans had been and continue to be excluded. Black writers argue for more than simple inclusion; indeed, they argue for the kind of political world in which they would not have to make such an argument. They argue for and actively seek to create a world otherwise. To understand this theory, The Practice of Citizenship moves beyond simply defining "citizenship" and pursues the processes by which black citizens used print to articulate and enact the citizenship they theorized. How black print culture imagined citizenship is therefore as central to this study as the citizenship they imagined, and by the end of this book, I hope it is clear that the process of theorizing does the work of citizenship.

I examine the parallel development of U.S. citizenship and early black print culture through key understudied flashpoints (the 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic and outbreaks of antislavery violence in 1856), movements (black state conventions and vigilance committees), intellectuals (James McCune Smith and William J. Wilson), and genres (the sketch, ballad, and convention minutes). I begin with events recorded in Absalom Jones and Richard Allen's A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People (1794) and end with Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's sketches for the last issues of the Anglo-African Magazine (1859-1860) just before the Civil War. Black citizenship theorizing developed over time as a collaborative, multimedia, polygeneric cultural and intellectual process for sustaining life in a fundamentally unjust society. For these writers, citizenship (and blackness itself) emerges not as a destination, an enacted identity, or static relation to a state but rather as a self-reflexive, dialectical process of becoming.

As state policies and public discourse around citizenship were becoming more racially restrictive, black activists articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship, not as a common identity as such but rather as a set of common practices: political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, both physical and virtual. They reject definitions of "citizen" based on who a person is, a preordained or predefined subject or subjectivity, in favor of definitions grounded in the active engagement in the process of creating and maintaining collectivity, whether defined as state, community, or other affiliative structure. Citizenship, in other words, is not a thing determined by who one is but rather by what one does. Law and custom shape these activities (negatively and positively), but they do not make citizenship or citizens. Practicing citizenship makes citizens.

Citizenship practices create citizens by enabling them, to quote Michel de Certeau, "to take up a position in the network of social relations" made up not only of currently recognized citizens but also of people who, by virtue of their engagement with and contribution to the whole, become citizens. This "more or less coherent and fluid assemblage of elements" is simultaneously formal, performative, and open to...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
081225080X
ISBN 13 
9780812250800
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
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