05036nam 2200685 450 991079330910332120200520144314.00-8122-9577-310.9783/9780812295771(CKB)4100000007649427(MiAaPQ)EBC5703312(DE-B1597)527694(OCoLC)1085493272(DE-B1597)9780812295771(Au-PeEL)EBL5703312(EXLCZ)99410000000764942720190314d2019 uy 0engurcnu||||||||txtrdacontentcrdamediacrrdacarrierThe practice of citizenship Black politics and print culture in the early United States /Derrick R. SpiresPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania :University of Pennsylvania Press,2019.1 online resource (353 pages)0-8122-5080-X Includes bibliographical references and index.Front matter --CONTENTS --Introduction. Black Theorizing: Reimagining a "Beautiful but Baneful Object" --Chapter 1. Neighborly Citizenship in Absalom Jones and Richard Allen's A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late and Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year 1793 --Chapter 2. Circulating Citizenship in the Black State Conventions of the 1840's --Chapter 3. Economic Citizenship in Ethiop and Communipaw's New York --Chapter 4. Critical Citizenship in the Anglo-African Magazine, 1859-1860 --Chapter 5. Pedagogies of Revolutionary Citizenship --Conclusion. "To Praise Our Bridges" --Notes --Bibliography --Index --AcknowledgmentsIn 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.African AmericansPolitical activityHistory18th centuryAfrican AmericansPolitical activityHistory19th centuryCitizenshipUnited StatesHistory18th centuryCitizenshipUnited StatesHistory19th centuryCitizenship in literatureAmerican literatureAfrican American authorsHistory and criticismAmerican literature18th centuryHistory and criticismAmerican literature19th centuryHistory and criticismAfrican Studies.African-American Studies.American History.American Studies.Cultural Studies.Literature.African AmericansPolitical activityHistoryAfrican AmericansPolitical activityHistoryCitizenshipHistoryCitizenshipHistoryCitizenship in literature.American literatureAfrican American authorsHistory and criticism.American literatureHistory and criticism.American literatureHistory and criticism.323.1196073Spires Derrick R.1483253MiAaPQMiAaPQMiAaPQBOOK9910793309103321The practice of citizenship3701271UNINA