The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States
- ISBN-10
- 0812295773
- ISBN-13
- 9780812295771
- Category
- Literary Criticism
- Pages
- 352
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2019-02-08
- Publisher
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Author
- Derrick R. Spires
Description
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.
Get the book
Similar books
-
The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States
By Derrick R. SpiresThe Practice of Citizenship traces the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship.
-
The Practice of Global Citizenship
By Luis CabreraPortes, Alejandro, Cristina Escobar, and Alexandria Walton Radford. 2007. “Immigrant Transnational Organizations and Development: A Comparative Study,” International Migration Review 41(1): 242–81. Powell, Enoch. 1968.
-
The Practice of Citizenship: In Home, School, Business, and Community (Classic Reprint)
By Roscoe Lewis AshleyAbout the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work.
-
Making Rights Claims: A Practice of Democratic Citizenship
By Karen ZiviHunter, Nan. 1992. “Complications of Gender: Women and HIV Disease.” In AIDS Agenda: Emerging Issues in Civil Rights, eds. Nan Hunter and William Rubenstein (pp. 5–40). New York: New Press. Ignatieff, Michael. 2001.
-
From Principles to Practice in Education for Intercultural Citizenship
By Michael Byram, Irina Golubeva, Manuela WagnerThe contributors to this volume have collaborated to present their work on introducing competences in intercultural communication and citizenship into foreign language education.
-
Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice
By David WilesJust as Heywood's Brutus plays the merry madman to conceal his views, so his play uses the cover of Rome, comedy and folk music to bypass royal censorship. Admittedly, royal power was now more secure than it had been in 1599.
-
Shaping Citizenship: A Political Concept in Theory, Debate and Practice
By Anna Björk, Hanna-Mari Kivistö, Claudia WiesnerThe three parts of the book focus respectively on theories, debates and practices of citizenship. In the chapters, constructions and struggles related to citizenship are approached by experts from different fields.
-
American Citizenship and Constitutionalism in Principle and Practice
By Joseph Postell, Steven F. PittzAs the most fundamental aspects of American citizenship and constitutionalism come under ever more powerful pressure, and as the nation’s politics increasingly give way to divisive, partisan extremes, this book responds to the critical ...
-
The Practice of Citizenship in Home, School, Business and Community
By Roscoe Lewis AshleyThis is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.
-
Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class & Citizenship
By Kathleen CanningElizabeth Grosz , " Inscriptions and Body - Maps : Representations and the Corporeal , " in Feminine , Masculine , and Representation , ed . Terry Threadgold and Anne CrannyFrancis ( Sydney , 1990 ) , p . 64.