The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires (review)

The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires is an intelligent and well-researched analysis of how writers of African descent in the New World understood and demonstrated citizenship from the late eighteenth century until the dawn of the Civil War. Ranging from a 1794 narrative by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen to 1860 magazine sketches by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, literatures by black intellectuals defined citizenship not merely in the typical terms of the Constitution. These writers recognized that the Constitution, along with the legislative and judicial proclamations born from it, proscribed the legal claim of blacks to national citizenship. For early black writers, citizenship emanated from a self-reflexive process by which the collective pursuit of racial equality required special rhetorical and cultural modes of political expression.

Spires advances the scholarly arguments of Jeannine Marie DeLom-bard, Gregg Crane, and Hoang Gia Phan that people of African descent struggled to achieve legal consummation of their citizenship between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. The scope of his book transcends the concepts of citizenship overly attributed to the likes of Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and Martin Delany. And his work builds on the previous scholarship by Dorothy Porter and Robert B. Stepto on early black writings (or on expressive print cultures), so that he could account for the complexity of organizations ranging from mutual aid and religious societies to labor unions and literary collectives. Against this methodological backdrop, The Practice of Citizenship explores the agency early black writers and intellectuals asserted in acquiring a sense of national belonging despite the legal or juridical hurdles society placed before them. Such “unsanctioned” practice of citizenship, Spires suggests, demands an analysis sensitive to the early black cultural and political activities that we otherwise may have regarded as obscure or incomprehensible.

The Practice of Citizenship illustrates this remarkable world across five chapters. In the first chapter, we learn that the “neighborly citizenship” articulated by Jones and Allen in Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People (1794) apprised contemporaneous readers of the mutual social benefits of democratic interaction. Reframing citizenship in terms of state conventions held in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio in the 1840s, the second chapter explains how the “circulating citizenship” at these conventions manifested the familiarity of black participants with the protocols of committee-based governance and the systematic exchange of intellectual ideas. Unequal access to convention spaces and resources, whereby black men were privileged over black women, unfortunately highlighted the internecine divisions of gender that plagued black aspirations to racial collectivity. Chapter 3 interprets economic enactments of citizenship—or “economic citizenship,” in short. By analyzing the communications between William J. Wilson and James McCune Smith, under the respective pseudonyms Ethiop and Communipaw, in Frederick Douglass’s Paper from 1851 to 1854, Spires unveils the varying perspectives on the promise of certain classes—as antithetical as the aristocracy and the laborer—in representing black economic self-interest. The following chapter highlights the concept of “critical citizenship,” a special mode of racial-political rhetoric in which Frederick Douglass and fellow writers for the Anglo-African Magazine (from 1859 to 1860) critiqued the discursive prohibition of blacks from legitimate claims to citizenship in early American society. The fifth and final chapter emphasizes the “revolutionary citizenship” featured in the poetry and prose of Harper (such as Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects in 1857 and her short fiction published in 1860 in the Anglo-African Magazine, “Fancy Sketches” and “Triumph of Freedom—A Dream”). Revolutionary discourse may be regarded as an extension of the critical discourse explained in the previous chapter but with the spectacular expression of urgency in narrating violence as a disruptive counterforce to hegemonic, if white supremacist, renditions of Western history. The book concludes with identifiable recurrences, after the Civil War, of the anxieties, strategies, and controversies surrounding practices...