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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