LITMIR.BIZ

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changing understandings of citizenship in the wake of midcentury market revolutions. Both Wilson and Smith read the United States as tending toward economic citizenship, a structure in which the market displaces civil society as the privileged space of citizenship practices and civic identity. Yet, where Wilson argues pragmatically for the cultivation of a “black aristocracy,” economic representatives for what he saw as a solidifying U.S. oligarchy, Smith valorizes the “best average colored” person as the embodiment of a new urban republicanism, the foundation for a strong democratic polity of laboring folk.

      Wilson and Smith use their pseudonymous narrators, “Ethiop” and “Communipaw,” and the generic flexibility of the sketch to lay out the kinds of fluid subjectivities best suited to navigate the new civic-economic terrain, the former offering a street-savvy businessman viewing the economic landscape from the “heights” and the latter a “whitewasher,” a skilled laborer who transgresses boundaries and insists on a horizontal configuration of politics. Rather than a precursor to the Washington–Du Bois debates that have become standard to our narrative of black intellectualism, however, these two collaborated to create a culture of engagement through literary expression. Their collection of fictionalized case studies, ethnographic observations, and flâneur-like urban narratives highlights the degree to which black conceptions of citizenship unfolded not just in speeches, conventions, and pamphlets but also through communities of letters engaged in explicitly literary discussions about representation.

      The writers and collectives I examine throughout this book did not separate politics, citizenship, and critique. They did not restrict politics to voting or specialized spaces, and while the state conventions often restricted or did not credit women’s participation, as I discuss in Chapter 2, these restrictions themselves became a matter of critique from within the conventions themselves. While the chapters on neighborliness, circulation, and economics are all also concerned with practices of critique and revolution, this book’s final two chapters take up critical and revolutionary citizenship explicitly. Separating the two allows me to distinguish between two fronts: (1) how black writers analyzed and critiqued the framing of public thought and citizenship and (2) how black writers analyzed and represented the violence—cognitive, physical, and aesthetic—of breaking that framing and found in antislavery violence, be it fugitive rescues or insurrections, sites of knowledge production. In this sense, while slave rebellions are certainly moments of critique, characterizing them as revolution emphasizes not just their physicality but also the way they created new worlds and, even in failure, reaffirmed a sense of potentiality.

      Chapter 4 examines the meaning of critique and the means for cultivating a critical sense among a diverse citizenry. Through the Anglo-African Magazine (1859–1860), I outline a collective and participatory project of building different idioms of citizenship and peoplehood as a counter to the “limitation of humanity and human rights” and “truth,” following editor Thomas Hamilton and Frederick Douglass, that national fantasies of white citizenship authorized.¹⁰¹ Critique under white citizenship allows deliberation within the structural confines of the racial contract but punishes discourse operating outside those confines. No matter how acrimonious Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas became in 1858, for instance, both candidates cultivated a taste for white supremacist citizenship. Each performance reaffirmed whiteness as foundational and set this reaffirmation as the linchpin that would maintain the Union and that would get either Lincoln or Douglas elected.¹⁰² By contrast, critical citizenship is at its core concerned with identifying, probing, and challenging these frameworks and taste regimes. The work in the Anglo-African Magazine—serialized fiction, scientific and historical treatises, and polemics—cultivates readers’ tastes for understandings of history, the constitutional “we the people,” and politics more broadly as messy, sometimes contradictory, and always in process. Through William J. Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery” series, the chapter examines how the “thrillingly sublime courage” of slave resistance catalyzes this disruptive process and serves as a warning that critique, without a concomitant impulse to action, risks reproducing the very closures it is meant to defy.

      Taking up the question of consciousness raising, revolutionary violence, and literary representation, Chapter 5 uses Harper’s writing, speaking, and activism in the years before the Civil War to explore the cultural work that could sustain a prolonged battle for emancipation, even if, or perhaps especially when, violent conflict seemed not only imminent but also necessary.¹⁰³ These writings—letters, poetry, sketches, and short stories—offer an overview of black political rhetoric and citizenship practices from the past decades and analyze their grounding ethos. They argue that this work should be focused through the fight against enslavement and the greater dissemination of freedom. Harper theorizes the generative power of the word and the connections between theory and practice and word and deed perhaps more clearly than any other writer this book examines. Her work from the months between John Brown’s execution and the first shots of the Civil War use the sublime—identified as sublime, agitation, soul energy—to reinvigorate sensibility, to reconnect it to a sense of possibility in a moment of uncertainty and pessimism. The retrospective and reflexive nature of Harper’s work also occasions a critique of the previous chapters, a warning that even if the principles I outline here are consistent in nature, their application must adapt to the contingencies of context. In a broader sense, her meditations on the sublime—identified as sublime, agitation, soul energy, and the like—raise questions about the relation between revolution, righteous violence, and citizenship and prompt us to ask, “What happens after critique?”

      While still active today in movements such as Black Lives Matter, environmental justice actions, and advocacy for refugee communities, we know in hindsight that these versions of citizenship have yet to become common practice. Formal recognition of black citizenship in the shape of the Fourteenth Amendment brought with it new forms of subjection in part by nationalizing the racial restrictions that had been in force in northern states for decades. And the amendment did nothing to include Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, or others.¹⁰⁴ To the extent that The Practice of Citizenship tells a story, then, it is a story about the tension between black citizens’ creative struggle for a just society based on the promises they saw in republican self-governance set against the developing national predilection to foreclose such possibilities through increasingly restrictive legal and social practices. The continued pressure of such a volatile landscape forced black theorists to rethink and rearticulate their relation to the state continually, resulting in a body of literature that offers some of the most incisive analyses of citizenship available today.

      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

      With regard to the emigration to Africa you mention, we have at present but little to communicate on that head, apprehending every pious man is a good citizen of the whole world.

      —Reply of the Free African Society (Philadelphia,

      Pennsylvania) to the Union Society of Africans

      (Newport, Rhode Island), October 1789

      The 1789 response from the Free African Society (FAS) to the African Union Society of Rhode Island’s proposal for a settlement in Africa projects a sense of optimism at the close of the eighteenth century. Rather than cite the new federal Constitution or the spread of “republicanism,” the FAS sees a cosmopolitan citizenship manifesting in the “expressive language of conduct” of those “persons who are sacrificing their own time, ease and property for us, the stranger and the fatherless, in this wilderness.”¹ More than an article of faith, however, the FAS provides a statement about citizenship practices by way of what the good citizen does and, as important, how the good citizen views and engages others, stranger and friend alike. The pious citizen does not identify fellow

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