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The Practice of Citizenship
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.
eBook
Living with Lynching
Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other that lynching victims were not the isolated brutes that dominant discourses made them out to be. Instead, the play scripts often described victims as honorable heads of households being torn from model domestic units by white violence. _x000B__x000B_In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans. Examining lynching plays as archival texts that embody and reflect broad networks of sociocultural activism and exchange in the lives of black Americans, Mitchell finds that audiences were rehearsing and improvising new ways of enduring in the face of widespread racial terrorism. Images of the black soldier, lawyer, mother, and wife helped readers assure each other that they were upstanding individuals who deserved the right to participate in national culture and politics. These powerful community coping efforts helped African Americans band together and withstand the nation's rejection of them as viable citizens. _x000B__x000B_The Left of Black interview with author Koritha Mitchell begins at 14:00._x000B__x000B__x000B__x000B_An interview with Koritha Mitchell at The Ohio Channel._x000B_
eBook
Virtuous Citizens
Demonstrates how contemporary manifestations of civic
publics trace directly to the early days of
nationhood The rise of the bourgeois public sphere
and the contemporaneous appearance of counterpublics in the
eighteenth century deeply influenced not only how politicians and
philosophers understood the relationships among citizens,
disenfranchised subjects, and the state but also how members of
the polity understood themselves. In
Virtuous Citizens :
Counterpublics and Sociopolitical Agency in Transatlantic
Literature , Kendall McClellan uncovers a fundamental and
still redolent transformation in conceptions of civic identity
that occurred over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Literature of this period exposes an emotional
investment in questions of civic selfhood born out of concern for
national stability and power, which were considered products of
both economic strength and a nation’s moral fiber.
McClellan shows how these debates traversed the Atlantic to
become a prominent component of early American literature,
evident in works by James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria
Sedgwick, Sarah Josepha Hale, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among
others. Underlying popular opinion about who could participate in
the political public, McClellan argues, was an impassioned
rhetorical wrestling match over the right and wrong ways to
demonstrate civic virtue. Relying on long-established tropes of
republican virtue that lauded self-sacrifice and disregard for
personal safety, abolitionist writers represented loyalty to an
ideals-based community as the surest safeguard of both private
and public virtue. This evolution in civic virtue sanctioned acts
of protest against the state, offered disenfranchised citizens a
role in politics, and helped usher in the modern transnational
public sphere.
Virtuous Citizens shows that the modern public sphere
has always constituted a vital and powerful space for those
invested in addressing injustice and expanding democracy. To
illuminate some of the fundamental issues underlying
today’s sociopolitical unrest, McClellan traces the
transatlantic origins of questions still central to the
representation of movements like Black Lives Matter, the
Women’s March, and the Alt-Right: What is the primary
loyalty of a virtuous citizen? Are patriots those who defend the
current government against attacks, external and internal, or
those who challenge the government to fulfill sociopolitical
ideals?
eBook
Around 1945 : literature, citizenship, rights
\"Around 1945 examines an issue that preoccupied social and political thinkers at mid-century and that has resonance still: Who is a citizen and on what grounds is citizenship defined? The volume attempts to articulate some of the complexities that inform the relation between citizenship and human rights in light of a reconsideration of citizenship and rights that occurred in the postwar era. Literary texts and cultural events model problems of rights, such as dignity, freedom, sovereignty, and responsibility. The ssays are unified by an investigation of the human and cultural aspects of universal rights.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
State power, stigmatization, and youth resistance culture in the French Banlieues
State Power, Stigmatization, and Youth Resistance Culture in the French Banlieues: Uncanny Citizenship studies the invisibility of visible minorities in a space relegated to the periphery of major French cities.
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Civic longing : the speculative origins of U.S. citizenship
Citizenship defines the U.S. political experiment, but the modern legal category that it now names is a relatively recent invention. There was no Constitutional definition of citizenship until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, almost a century after the Declaration of Independence. Civic Longing looks at the fascinating prehistory of U.S. citizenship in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, when the cultural and juridical meaning of citizenship--as much as its scope--was still up for grabs. Carrie Hyde recovers the numerous cultural forms through which the meaning of citizenship was provisionally made and remade in the early United States. Civic Longing offers the first historically grounded account of the formative political power of the imaginative traditions that shaped early debates about citizenship. In the absence of a centralized legal definition of citizenship, Hyde shows, politicians and writers regularly turned to a number of highly speculative traditions--political philosophy, Christian theology, natural law, fiction, and didactic literature--to authorize visions of what citizenship was or ought to be. These speculative traditions sustained an idealized image of citizenship by imagining it from its outer limits, from the point of view of its \"negative civic exemplars\"--expatriates, slaves, traitors, and alienated subjects. By recovering the strange, idiosyncratic meanings of citizenship in the early United States, Hyde provides a powerful critique of originalism, and challenges anachronistic assumptions that read the definition of citizenship backward from its consolidation in the mid-nineteenth century as jus soli or birthright citizenship.-- Provided by publisher
Book
Performance, identity, and immigration law : a theatre of undocumentedness
How has contemporary American theatre presented so-called undocumented immigrants? Placing theatre artists and their work within a context of on-going debate, Guterman shows how theatre fills an essential role in a critical conversation by exploring the powerful ways in which legal labels affect and change us.
eBook