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.
Abstract
This essay introduces the major themes and concerns of “Genealogies of Black Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century,” a special issue of American Literary History. How does modernity look ...when read through Black diasporic literary production in the long nineteenth century, broadly conceived? What new narratives can we create by reading this literature as participating in and producing transatlantic genealogies of literary modernity? How does reading Black literary modernity in the nineteenth century disrupt our understandings of modernity as a conceptual framework both for contemporary scholarship and as an object of nineteenth-century Black intellectual inquiry? This introductory essay defines Black modernities of the long nineteenth century as a set of related, sometimes connected, practices and questions focused on the nature of Black life and culture in an ever-shifting antiblack world. Writers from Phillis Wheatley to Pauline Hopkins—to offer one framing—were invested in chronicling and intervening in the newness of their moment, even as they worked to imagine new possibilities for the future.
Our task, then, was to deliberate over what something called modernity meant and means for and in African American literary history through the archive of Black writing and through the terms and forms these writers set forth.
This essay uses a brief attack from James McCune Smith on William Howard Day, editor of The Aliened American (1853–55), to recover, partially, The Aliened’s history and to meditate on questions of ...gender and pseudonymity in Black periodicals. The moment serves as an entrée into a larger printscape of aesthetic play and unwritten codes of social experiences that twenty-first-century readers might find reminiscent of modern social media.
...Harper studies has been thriving for decades and continues to grow. Koritha Mitchell's new cultural edition of Harper's fourth novel, Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows of Uplift (first published in 1892), ...provides a compelling new entry in this tradition and an indispensable resource for those who assign Harper regularly or who have hesitated to teach Iola out of concern for the syllabus space required to get students up to speed on its historical and cultural contexts. Iola, Mitchell posits, "exemplifies the dynamism and complexity of … 'community conversation' … the broad, dynamic discussions among African Americans about the countless issues affecting community members' life chances and well-being" (30).
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.
In the decade after the State of Pennsylvania’s 1838 constitution disenfranchised its black citizens, black Pennsylvanians signaled a more aggressive approach to citizenship and activism. While the ...1848 Convention of Colored Citizens’ distinction between personal freedom and political freedom understates the political nature of the previous generation’s work—which included sending petitions to state and federal governments, founding black mutual aid societies and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and initiating the National Colored Convention Movement—the comparison does signal a change in citizenship practices between the 1790s and the 1840s. By the 1840s, voting had become one of the central
Where the Anglo-African Magazine’s first volume opened with a portrait and biography of Alexander Dumas—an avatar for the magazine’s emphasis on art and history—the 1860 volume presents Ira ...Aldridge’s Aaron from Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy (Figure 8). The image signals a more overtly militant orientation for 1860 but also maintains the magazine’s insistence that art and scholarship constitute a form of insurgency. Originally, Titus Andronicus’s Aaron was neither noble Othello nor redeemable hero. Rather, he is a captive of the Roman Empire, master manipulator, and an ostensibly unrepentant villain. While Shakespeare’s original provides little room for
In a February 1860 essay for the Anglo-African Magazine (1859–1860), William J. Wilson, writing as Ethiop, asks, “What for the best good of all shall we do with the White people?”¹ Turning the tables ...on the usual racist formulation, Ethiop’s essay invites readers to rethink U.S. history as a narrative of white duplicity and avarice that ultimately threatens republican citizenship at home and abroad:
Twice have they quarreled with, stripped off, and fought the mother who gave them origin and nursed them till they were grown; and once have they most unmercifully beaten their weaker and more pacific neighbor;
By the 1840s and 1850s, black reformers not only began claiming their labor, enslaved and free, as “an integral part of their identities” but also, as historian Leslie M. Harris observes, began ...seeing “in meaningful labor a path to equality.”¹ In doing so, they were drawing on the increased linkage of race and labor in political discourse, the material exigencies of a modern U.S. market economy, and the constraints both placed on black citizenship. Even before the revolution, labor was a hotly contested concept in terms of citizenship practice. By the 1830s, however, citizens had come to understand their economic
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