LITMIR.BIZ

      Black Theorizing

      Reimagining a “Beautiful but Baneful Object”

      Fellow Citizens

      This book is about the questions and methodologies that emerge when we focus our analyses on the concerns black writers made foremost and on understanding these concerns in the terms they set forth. When we approach early black writing through a print culture made up of pamphlets, poems, sketches, orations, appeals, treatises, convention proceedings, letters, mastheads, gift books, petitions, autobiographies, and a host of other kinds of documents by black individuals and collectives, citizenship quickly emerges as a key term and vexed concept. A perusal of Dorothy Porter’s touchstone Early Negro Writings (1971) reveals a collection of addresses on the abolition of the slave trade from 1808 to 1815 that begin, “Fathers, Brethren, and Fellow Citizens,” or simply, “Citizens.”¹ Martin R. Delany dedicates Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People in the United States (1852) “to the American People, North and South. By Their Most Devout, and Patriotic Fellow Citizen, the Author”; Frederick Douglass addresses his July 5th “Oration” to “fellow citizens,” even as he positions himself outside the “nation”; and many of the collective addresses black citizens issued to various publics through colored conventions were addressed to “fellow citizens.”² Even texts that did not argue for citizenship in the United States provide productive analyses about citizenship more broadly—what it was in the moment and what it could become. “Citizen,” as the 1854 National Emigration Convention put it, was “a term desired and ever cherished” throughout early black America. While this convention argued explicitly for emigration, it nonetheless made useful claims about the meaning of citizenship, perhaps more so because it highlighted its abrogation for black Americans.³

      These explicit and implicit invocations of citizenship throughout early black print culture suggest that citizenship was a potent concept. Yet, it is still one of the most understudied by critics of early African American literature. It’s not that scholars haven’t taken up questions of black citizenship—that is, whether or not black Americans were U.S. citizens, legal persons, or humans before the law; the ways they made the case for their citizenship; and the multiform ways (local and national; cultural, economic, and political) that white Americans made clear their refusal to recognize black Americans as equal citizens, if citizens at all.⁴ These questions have been ably taken up and will continue to be important points of analysis. Yet, while scholars continue to recover histories of citizenship that document and analyze black activism and trace processes of racial ascription and white supremacy, we have yet to describe the degree to which black writers themselves conceptualized and transformed the meaning of citizenship in the early republic.⁵ Even when studies have taken up black theoretical work, they tend to focus on Frederick Douglass’s writing or conflicts between Douglass and other men (Henry Highland Garnet and Martin Delany prominent among them).⁶ Overemphasizing Douglass flattens out a vibrant intellectual network of newspaper correspondents, convention goers, pamphleteers, and artists, whose key texts and forms were more often than not generated collectively. Hence, this book demonstrates the communal facets of citizenship discourse in black print culture to show that individuals and collectives were both critical to theorizing and practicing citizenship. What I demonstrate in this book stems from answering the following key questions: What happens to our thinking about citizenship if, instead of reading black writers as reacting to or a presence in a largely white-defined discourse, we base our working definitions of citizenship on black writers’ proactive attempts to describe their own political work? What happens when we base our working definition of citizenship on black writers’ texts written explicitly to and for black communities?

      The proliferation of the phrase “fellow citizen” was more than a rhetorical device or ironic signifying. The Practice of Citizenship tells a story about how black writers theorized and practiced citizenship in the early United States through a robust print culture. It insists on exploring citizenship not just from the perspective of law and its framing of black people and others but also from the perspective of black Americans, who were some of the most important theorists of citizenship, both then and now. Yes, the texts I analyze here argue for black citizenship, but the citizenship for which they argue is not the same citizenship from which black Americans had been and continue to be excluded. Black writers argue for more than simple inclusion; indeed,

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