- The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires
The Practice of Citizenship corrects an omission. Scholars "have yet to describe the degree to which black writers themselves conceptualized and transformed the meaning of citizenship in the early republic" (2), the opening pages contend, and it is this work of historical description that fills the monograph's five chapters. Across them, dilating on examples from nineteenth-century black publication and the social worlds that come together around them, citizenship emerges as a central point of concern, "a key term and vexed concept" (1). [End Page 153]
The vexed-ness is central to the story. Nineteenth-century black writers and thinkers concerned themselves with citizenship as a category, Spires argues, not because it was available to them or sanctioned by law—often it wasn't—but because this category became a way for free African Americans to imagine political, cultural, and sometimes economic participation in antebellum public life. As its title suggests, however, The Practice of Citizenship emphasizes not just that imagining but also the instantiations and enactments that follow from it. or, as Spires puts it elegantly, "black theorizing insisted on and created black citizens in the act of insisting" (6).
These animated actions are grounded in an archive of print publications. Such an archive may seem counter-intuitive, as print tends to be fixed and static while performance tends to be active and dynamic. Yet, Spires shows, printed texts don't just sit there, and instead circulate, move, and incite. The Practice of Citizenship emphasizes print publications as kinds of "performative speech acts" (82), many of which provoke debate and response—many of which, in other words, provoke further performances. Conceptualized in this way, the monograph focuses less on "whether and when" African Americans were legal citizens and more on "how" they "theorize and enact citizenship through print culture" and how, in turn, this work shaped "early black print" (246). Authored by a literature professor, The Practice of Citizenship is interested in discourses and representations of citizenship, to be sure, but it does not analyze these in isolation, seeking instead to restore them to the social and historical worlds that were the scenes of their creation. The version of literature that we read about, accordingly, is historically attuned to its time and place, yet also impacting and shifting the discourses that occur there.
Individual chapters span a number of genres—pamphlets, published proceedings, sketches, periodical literature, and poetry—and consider a number of touchstones in black public life in the antebellum U.S.: Richard Allen and Absalom Jones's writings on Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic, the proceedings of the Colored Conventions of the 1840s, James McCune Smith's and William J. Wilson's writings in Douglas's Paper in the 1850s, Wilson's Afric-American Picture Gallery in the Anglo-African Magazine, and Frances Harper's speeches and writings up to the Civil War. All of these texts have been studied before, a fact revealed in footnotes that display a thorough engagement with the work of prior scholars. At the same time, all these texts are very much understudied and, more to the point, rarely linked to one another in the kind of genealogy that The Practice of Citizenship offers. The real story of black citizenship theorizing, Spires persuasively insists, "is less in the individual theories themselves and more the processes through which black writers generated citizenship in a nation whose definition of 'citizen' was often deferred, improvised, and increasingly premised on turning assumptions [End Page 154] about black exclusion into legal fact" (246). To further emphasize the genealogy and latent conversation that operates across the monograph's archive, figures and texts that have typically been overrepresented in recent scholarly study of African American literature, including Frederick Douglass and slave narratives, are rendered deliberately marginal to its story.
The strength of this study is in this ability to breathe life into the past and to...