TY - BOOK AU - Spires,Derrick R. TI - The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States SN - 9780812295771 AV - E185.18 U1 - 323.1196/073 23 PY - 2019///] CY - Philadelphia PB - University of Pennsylvania Press KW - African Americans KW - Political activity KW - History KW - 18th century KW - 19th century KW - American literature KW - African American authors KW - History and criticism KW - Citizenship in literature KW - Citizenship KW - United States KW - History-African American KW - Interdisciplinary-African American Studies KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Politics KW - bisacsh KW - African Studies KW - African-American Studies KW - American History KW - American Studies KW - Cultural Studies KW - Literature KW - citizenship KW - print culture N1 - Frontmatter --; 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 1840s --; 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 --; Acknowledgments; restricted access N2 - 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 UR - https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812295771 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780812295771 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780812295771/original ER -