I examine the parallel development of U.S. citizenship and early black print culture through key understudied flashpoints (the 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic and outbreaks of antislavery violence in 1856), movements (black state conventions and vigilance committees), intellectuals (James McCune Smith and William J. Wilson), and genres (the sketch, ballad, and convention minutes). I begin with events recorded in Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People (1794) and end with Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s sketches for the last issues of the Anglo-African Magazine (1859–1860) just before the Civil War. Black citizenship theorizing developed over time as a collaborative, multimedia, polygeneric cultural and intellectual process for sustaining life in a fundamentally unjust society. For these writers, citizenship (and blackness itself) emerges not as a destination, an enacted identity, or static relation to a state but rather as a self-reflexive, dialectical process of becoming.
As state policies and public discourse around citizenship were becoming more racially restrictive, black activists articulated an expansive, practicebased theory of citizenship, not as a common identity as such but rather as a set of common practices: political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, both physical and virtual. They reject definitions of “citizen” based on who a person is, a preordained or predefined subject or subjectivity, in favor of definitions grounded in the active engagement in the process of creating and maintaining collectivity, whether defined as state, community, or other affiliative structure.7 Citizenship, in other words, is not a thing determined by who one is but rather by what one does.8 Law and custom shape these activities (negatively and positively), but they do not make citizenship or citizens. Practicing citizenship makes citizens.
Citizenship practices create citizens by enabling them, to quote Michel de Certeau, “to take up a position in the network of social relations” made up not only of currently recognized citizens but also of people who, by virtue of their engagement with and contribution to the whole, become citizens.9 This “more or less coherent and fluid assemblage of elements” is simultaneously formal, performative, and open to improvisation. It is governed by rules and conventions that are nonetheless subject to misfire and therefore under constant revision and contestation on scales large and small.10 Practices form a tradition insofar as they draw on catalogues of past activities and habits (from ways of worship and manners of speech to understandings of gender and sexuality, race and class), but they constantly respond to context and the need to make sense of the now. My sense of citizenship as a practice, then, is capacious, embracing recognizable acts, such as voting, alongside less structured acts, such as greeting others on the street. Both acts can signal membership in a political body, and exclusion or refusal (in the act of greeting) can become mechanisms of erasure or identifying those outside the bounds of “citizen.” That is, citizenship and struggles for citizenship happen outside of official state institutions, in those very spaces black writers consistently cite as life sustaining. And it is through these sites that restrictive notions of belonging can be contested and in which alternate models can be theorized and practiced.
The role of spaces beyond state sanction is crucial to my argument. While it is true that the state provides one powerful structure for shaping citizenship, that does not mean that people who do not have this sanction are not theorizing and practicing citizenship.11 Yet that is how we typically understand it. The state sanctions certain practices and enables those in power to limit the range of activities we come to recognize as citizenship. This book, though, recognizes the unsanctioned activities of citizenship, arguing that they are perhaps more powerful and productive than the state allows and that scholarship has adequately acknowledged. As Dana Nelson claims in terms of vernacular citizenship, these practices are “immediate, informal, and non-delegable,” not individual but rather “grounded in community. Not a ritual in the sense of voting, the democratic power of the commons is both colloquial and routine:a daily practice.”12 And while, as Saidiya Hartman reminds us, such practices under conditions of domination rarely result in lasting victories, they do open new possibilities of political action and for valuing everyday activities in making community.13
As the chapters that follow suggest, in each reiterative instance, “citizen” invokes a civic ethos and protocols of recognition and justice that call on audiences to think about their relation to citizens and others as one of mutual responsibility, responsiveness, and active engagement, a relation in which membership and individual rights come with moral obligations to a collective. Put differently, citizenship for these writers is not reducible to individual interest nor should it be managed by racial, economic, or other forms of hierarchy. Alongside and beyond state-organized relationships, black writers linked citizenship to those actions that create and sustain relations between people, within and without formal politics. Absalom Jones’s 1799 petition to the “President, Senate, and House of Representatives,” for instance, claimed citizenship for his fellow petitioners, including enslaved people, “believing them to be objects of your representation in your public councils, in common with ourselves and every other class of citizens within the jurisdiction of the United States.”14 But they were not merely objects of representation; rather, they were included in the Constitution’s “We, the people of the United States” and, as such, were not outsiders asking for inclusion in the body politic or for a special dispensation. Black citizens, including enslaved people, were “guardians of our rights, and patriots of equal and national liberties.”15 Thirty years later, when David Walker addressed his Appeal (1829) to the “colored citizens of the world, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of America,” he was similarly speaking “colored citizens” into being, making a claim about their relationship to traditionally recognized citizens, and calling on them to assume the rights and subjectivity of citizenship.
Beyond overt invocations of “citizen” and claims making, The Practice of Citizenship is concerned with the multiple spaces—physical and in print—where black citizens theorized and enacted citizenship. As social geographer Anna Secor notes, “The everyday life-spaces of the city—its neighborhoods, parks, streets, and buildings—” function as “both the medium through which citizenship struggles take place and, frequently, that which is at stake in the struggle.”16 While Secor’s work focuses on urban spatial practices, Practice of Citizenship demonstrates that the principle holds for spaces of all kinds, both physical and imaginary, including texts such as Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s 1794 Narrative or William J. Wilson’s 1859 “Afric-American Picture Gallery” in which “citizen” is not the operative term in play. As my discussions of neighborliness and economic citizenship reveal, black writers often found useful models for civic practices in unlikely places, such as the early American backcountry, picture galleries, parlors, or in abstract constructs such as the republic of letters.
At their most elastic, black theories framed enslaved people as rights-bearing citizens, found inspiration and instruction in antislavery violence, and embraced parlors and picture galleries as revolutionary spaces of marronage. “Forget not that you are native-born American citizens,” Henry Highland Garnet proclaims to his assumed audience of enslaved “brethren” in his “Address to the Slaves of the United States” (delivered 1843, first printed 1848), “and as such, you are justly entitled to all the rights that are granted to the freest.”17 Garnet argues that enslaved people, as citizens, had a right to refuse to labor without wages, leave the plantations if their masters did not comply, and defend themselves if their masters attempted to retain them by force. His recognition of their citizenship does not so much make them citizens before the law as it acknowledges and names a citizenship that they simply had to act on. In this sense, black theorizing insisted on and created black citizens in the act of insisting. The rest of this introduction