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lines of liberal humanist thought, but also to the formal and institutional structures that facilitate and constrain that imagining?”³⁹ The question itself is not necessarily a new one if we consider critical work from black literary studies that interrogated the relation between black writing and contemporaneous discourses such as sentimentalism or paradigms such as the public sphere.⁴⁰ Yet these recent iterations of the question and the print culture methodologies through which we have begun examining it place renewed emphasis on black writing’s work as simultaneously critical and creative and operating in forms and genres (conventions, pamphlets, periodical literature, and sketches) that remain understudied.

      Rather than ask how black citizens could achieve citizenship or had achieved citizenship as a destination defined by the state or white recognition, The Practice of Citizenship asks how black citizens defined citizenship themselves, claiming their everyday activities as doing the work of citizenship, often outside of or despite dominant political frameworks. The question for me is less how the state constructed citizenship or black citizens or how texts about black people produced a black civic presence or black (in)humanity and more how black theorists thought about and mobilized citizenship within and without legal constructions through their own collaboratively developed texts and spaces. In this sense, The Practice of Citizenship expands on Walter Johnson’s call to attend to how “enslaved people theorized their own actions and the practical process through which those actions provided the predicate for new ways of thinking about slavery and resistance.”⁴¹ Johnson’s observation about scholarship on enslavement also applies to studies of black print culture, where we often have more direct access to accounts from black citizens themselves about citizenship.

      My interest in taking up this inquiry through citizenship comes from the term’s equal ubiquity in black writing and its lack of a stable definition anywhere in the antebellum United States. Black citizenship theorizing developed in an era of proliferating, overlapping, contradictory, and improvisational definitions of citizenship from constitutional ratification through passage of the Fourteenth Amendment.⁴² Conceptions of citizenship were legion. Beyond taking my cue from black print, my interest in citizenship comes from a determination to not cede key political concepts—citizenship, civility, deliberation, and so on—to those who would use them to restrict freedom, access, and reparative justice. I am fully aware that these concepts carry with them the racist, imperialist, sexist, heteronormative, and Eurocentric traces of Enlightenment humanism, a humanism that was framed around and through white supremacy from its inception. Lauren Berlant, Russ Castronovo, Hartman, and others have described this dominant mode of citizenship as a process of subjection and a state apparatus “that narrows subjects to mere shadows of once embodied and engaged persons.”⁴³ It encourages citizens to cede politics to specialized classes and spaces in the name of consensus, impoverished civility, and moral innocence.

      At the same time, black citizens needed to be even more vigilant against the trappings of liberal citizenship and its logics of ahistorical individual responsibility. As Hartman has traced, a version of citizenship as “burdened individuality” enacted during Reconstruction served to subjugate newly freed black people under the guise of formal equality. Hartman notes, “The ascribed responsibility of the liberal individual served to displace the nation’s responsibility for providing and ensuring the rights and privileges conferred by the Reconstruction Amendments and shifted the burden of duty onto the freed. It was their duty to prove their worthiness for freedom rather than the nation’s duty to guarantee, at minimum, the exercise of liberty and equality, if not opportunities for livelihood other than debtpeonage.”⁴⁴ The “gift” of freedom erased any obligations on the part of the state to the past and made individual freepersons solely responsible for their present condition and future prospects. Hartman and others—and, as we shall see, early black theorizers—warn against a kind of cruel optimism in which the citizenship struggled for and won becomes the means for reconstructing modes of subjection, a bait-and-switch in which giving up on a more critically engaged citizenship and claims for reparative justice are the price for admission.⁴⁵

      Even so, citizenship remains a potent concept. Despite critical turns to transnational, international, Atlantic world, and other frameworks that decenter the nation-state, “despite,” as Ayelet Shachar notes, “jubilant predictions by post-nationalists of the imminent demise of citizenship, the legal distinction between member and stranger is, if anything, back with a vengeance.”⁴⁶ Citizenship can in fact be a powerful mode for grounding and organizing a more liberatory politics based in a “commitment to public debate, an insistence on grappling with material conditions, a refusal to absorb embodied differences under consensus.”⁴⁷ Black theorizing foregrounded these messy processes, arguing for a more radical citizenship even as it sometimes became trapped in its limits, particularly in terms of gender as the black state conventions demonstrate.⁴⁸ While we should continue critiquing citizenship’s exclusions and while we should continue looking for other modes of affiliation, we should also attend to the ways excluded people have reconceptualized and worked through citizenship as a productive social, political, and economic arrangement.

      More than challenge who is or is not a citizen or who can and cannot become a citizen under already recognized frameworks (birthright, property, gender, race, ethnicity, class, etc.), then, black theorizers redefined what citizenship meant. They weren’t looking to join the politically dead, and they were even less interested in acceding to their own political and social deaths. Like the Hebrew God confronting Ezekiel, they ask, “Can these dry bones live?” And like Ezekiel, they evince a faith that dry bones can indeed live, but they must first receive the word.⁴⁹ This “faith in the performative power of the word—both spoken and written” that Peterson highlights in black women’s writing recurs throughout black theorizing.⁵⁰ The word “agitates”: it disturbs complacency, upends commonsense logics, and confronts us with the limits of our own perceptions in a way that cultivates a higher awareness and compels action.

      These interruptive and intrusive acts constitute what I discuss in Chapters 4 and 5 as citizenship’s critical and revolutionary functions insofar as they challenge and redistribute the range of ideas and actions that are thinkable, knowable, sayable, and doable and the range of people who can think, know, say, and do them.⁵¹ The power of the creative word, as Jacques Rancière notes, is in its ability to “widen gaps, open up space for deviations, modify the speeds, trajectories, and the ways in which groups of people adhere to a condition, react to situations, recognize their images.”⁵² This last point is crucial. Black citizenship theorizing and early black print more broadly produced a different “angle of vision,” new “conditions of possibility for the political,” in its constant saying of the unsayable from people whose exclusion was increasingly framed as the precondition for American political union.⁵³ Black print offers narratives of an expanding universe, not a contracting one, in which citizenship is less about membership in a predefined group, less about granting and withholding privileges, and more about creating structures that maximize human potential and what they saw as the benefits of republican governance.

      Citizenship should enliven, not deaden. This vision of citizenship eschews neoliberal fantasies of a citizenry composed of abstractly equal disembodied individuals in favor of critically and collaboratively constructed citizenship practices. From the perspective of black theorizing, states do not make citizens—active and involved individuals and collectives create citizens. Or, as I argue in my discussion of neighborly citizenship, neighbors do not look for a good neighbor; they make neighborhood. Black writers argued that the state and civic institutions should work to strengthen the “social intercourse” that enables people to practice citizenship rather than allowing “private” racial, gender, or economic interests to create artificial barriers. Like the human body, the body politic could only grow stronger when power circulated evenly among its members, and like the human body (a potent metaphor in early Republican political discourse), it would suffer if this circulation were blocked.

      We see this emphasis on citizenship as enlivening and circulatory throughout black print. Hosea Easton’s A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political

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