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

Mary Helen Washington began her 1997 address to the American Studies Association asking the pivotal question: What happens when scholars put African American studies at the center of American studies? Literary historians can extend this question by asking: What happens when scholars stop approaching works written by African American authors as always in response to the discrimination and violence enacted by white Americans? What happens when we finally understand Black print culture as independent from white establishments and the ideologies that created them? Derrick R. Spires demonstrates in The Practice of Citizenship (winner of numerous prizes, including the MLA Prize for a First Book) that early Black writers have always been at the forefront of directing rather than merely responding to the conversation concerning the concept of citizenship in the United States. Early Black writers theorized not only what citizenship meant but also what actions it entailed as they demonstrated the practice of citizenship in their daily lives.

Early in his Introduction, Spires establishes the importance of attending to both collective and individually written works as part of the "collaborative, multimedia, polygeneric cultural and intellectual process" of understanding "citizenship (and blackness itself) as a self-reflexive, dialectical process of becoming" (3). Spires invites readers engaged in fields such as literature, history, and political science to understand the work of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black writers as arguing for more than mere recognition by the white legal establishment; instead, relying on texts produced by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, the Black state conventions, William J. Wilson, James McCune Smith, and Frances E. W. Harper, Spires argues that Black writers theorized and practiced five interrelated themes of citizenship in their political work. These themes include neighborliness, participatory politics and circulation, economic citizenship, critique, and revolution. "From the perspective of black theorizing," writes Spires, "states do not make citizens—active and involved individuals and collectives create citizens" (16). Thus, Spires places early Black theorists at the center of US citizenship studies. Early Black print culture proved vital to creating and illustrating citizenship's actual practice rather than its mere idea.

In the first chapter, Spires examines neighborliness—or "the ability of fellow citizens to engage each other on terms of mutual responsibility and good faith through 'real sensibility'"—as a citizenship practice in Jones and Allen's 1794 Narrative of the Proceedings of Black People (27). A text more commonly understood as written in response to Matthew Carey's A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (1793), which focused on the elite and depicted Black Philadelphians in a negative light, Jones and Allen's Narrative, Spires argues, corrects the horrific racial and economic assumptions about Black people's "real sensibility," or ability to achieve civic republic citizenship through depictions of neighborliness occurring between ordinary "poor black" women and men (35). Jones and Allen's Narrative achieves a racially and economically inclusive depiction of citizenship through neighborliness by restaging scenes from Carey's Account. As Spires puts it: "Narrative interrogates late eighteenth-century theories about the ethical relation between citizens by thinking about the kinds of relations the good citizen should actively produce rather than the inverse, how to produce or identify the good citizen" (36). In other words, Jones and Allen are less concerned with what white Americans claim citizenship to be and are more concerned with what actual civic republic and fellow citizenship look like—in other words, less with the talk and more with the walk. This perspective challenges the very capitalistic nature of citizenship and serves as the basis for the other themes that Spires examines in the later chapters.

While neighborliness makes participatory civic engagement an everyday practice that anyone can exercise, participatory politics and circulation counters "arguments that black people were … irredeemably inferior or too dependent on waged and manual labor to warrant full citizenship" (29). Spires examines the Black...