Citizenship and Early African American Print Culture
Scholars of African American literature and print culture have been drawing our attention to “early Negro writings” from a variety of collectives, including mutual aid societies, religious and fraternal organizations, sermons, confessionals, and constitutions, for decades. These texts bring to light a different set of intellectual, social, and cultural insights into what Porter describes as “the beginnings of the Afro-American’s artistic consciousness … the first articulations of the appeal of beauty and the moral sense.”18 While we have historically treated the documents comprising Porter’s Early Negro Writings as documentary or evidentiary in nature, Porter framed them as the institutional and cultural building blocks of a literary culture, one decidedly more collaborative and situated in ephemeral media than the texts privileged in our traditional literary historical focus on bound books and single-authored works. Carla Peterson, Elizabeth McHenry, Frances Smith Foster, Jocelyn Moody, Eric Gardner, John Ernest, and others have begun changing this tendency and have given us a robust sense of the “early Negro writings” emanating from a variety of collectives, including mutual aid societies, religious and fraternal organizations, literary societies, and labor unions.19 Their projects are not just about the recovery of texts or troubling the canon, nor do they seek to diminish the importance of the slave narrative or experiences of enslavement; rather, they are invested in creating a deeper understanding of the expressive print cultures black communities created out of these experiences. Black citizens did this work not simply as a response to white oppression but as a matter of course in the shaping of their own communities and in the process of meeting their own political, social, and cultural needs “to speak to and for themselves about matters they considered worthy of written words.”20 In those spaces, we still find free black Americans wrestling with issues of enslavement but also very much invested in local, everyday issues, slavery being one—though sometimes tertiary—issue among many. They meditate on ethical and deliberative notions of republican citizenship, model these paradigms through textual form and circulation, and activate them through embodied performances like conventions, vigilance activities, and everyday activities of walking, working, and loving.21
These narratives, then, take shape in what Gardner describes as “unexpected places”: print and geographical sites including periodicals, texts from the western states and territories, black writing in languages other than English, and massive collections of poetry that have yet to be fully explored or theorized.22 This book’s attention to print sources and how writers engaged them highlights the work of intellectuals such as William J. Wilson, who, often writing as “Ethiop,” featured prominently among his contemporaries but whose work is only now coming to critical light.23 It also draws on canonical figures such as Harper from their more understudied works and genres. By thinking about citizenship beyond the laws and state relations shaping it, thinking instead about how and where black writers theorized and enacted it, I broaden the range of texts and sites where we can analyze how citizenship theorizing happened. Some of these sites are obvious in their concern with citizenship, but our emphasis on their documentary nature, the sometimes messy fights over power between men like Douglass and Garnet, and the focus on nationalist/integrationist binaries has obscured the ways they produce ideas about citizenship, both in conversation with and quite different from contemporaneous models. The black state conventions, for instance, often outlined the legal and historical basis for black citizenship as they petitioned states to restore rights taken away from them. Beyond these arguments for citizenship, however, they were also theorizing and practicing citizenship in the modes through which they made these claims: in the many gatherings and print exchanges leading to the convention, in the deliberative activities of the conventions, and in the circulation and discussion following the conventions. The circulation of ideas, documents, and civic energies these conventions organized theorizes and enacts the participatory politics from which black citizens were being excluded formally.
Even as black writing offered theoretical readings of citizenship—that is, the content of black theories—its structure, innovative use of genre and form, and modes of circulation model the theories they sought to outline both in terms of how republican institutions should look and the critical sensibilities of the citizens who would constitute and, in turn, be constituted through them.24 Black writers’ attention to and experimentation with form, style, and the relation between politics and aesthetics challenge us to rethink our narratives of early African American literary history. Their work, from Jones and Allen’s 1794 Narrative to Harper’s 1860 “Triumph of Freedom” in the Anglo-African Magazine, suggests this history has routes that do not lead inexorably from slave narrative to novel but rather, like early national citizenship practices, proliferate in multiple directions.
The periodical press is particularly useful for analyzing this aspect of black theorizing, precisely because its structure cultivated multivocal, dialogic narratives, and its modes of circulation often demanded communal reading and reenactment. Ernest observes, “The periodical press was uniquely suited to the task of telling the story of African American history—because the story it could tell would be marked by narrative disruption and because, in telling the story, the press could only be multivocal and multiperspectival.”25 Todd Vogel has argued similarly that the ephemeral quality of the press “made the writers nimble. They could plunge into the public conversation and get their views out immediately” and, I would add, in a way that to some degree sidestepped the policing and paternalistic behavior of other activists, both white and black.26 While black men, Douglass in particular, have been canonized as representatives and drivers of black intellectual history, this archive offers a much wider range of voices and ideas. As “Caleb” reminds would-be leaders in “A Note on Leaders,” an 1861 article in the Weekly Anglo-African, while being “pious or educated at a time when knowing the alphabet seemed extraordinary” may have once vaulted any man to leadership, that time had long passed; black people could and were thinking and writing for themselves.27 Top-down (and, I would add, masculinist) notions of black leadership would work no longer, if they ever had.
As Benjamin Fagan posits, the black press forces us to think about the ways black writers constituted community outside of the nation-state form.28 This includes acknowledging that citizenship in the United States was not always (or sometimes even) the black press’s primary point of identification. At the same time, these collectives were still thinking through modes of organization and self-government, however formal or informal, that have much to teach us about citizenship as a relation created by and practiced between members of a community. The question these texts pose is less how citizenship theorizing in the black press imagined black Americans as U.S. citizens and more how black theorizing imagined citizenship practices within and without the U.S. nation-state. The black press and broader print archive, then, offers models of democratic exchange and the kinds of spaces and institutions (print, galleries, conventions, markets, etc.) that support it.
Black national and state conventions are another form to which The Practice of Citizenship gives special attention. These events and the texts they produced were by nature dialogic. They included the back and forth of debates before and during conventions along with the rendering of the physical events in print form for distribution and further commentary. The printed minutes have traditionally been objects only of historical and not literary analysis, though the Colored Convention’s Project’s dedication to chronicling the conventions as a cultural movement is quickly changing that. While the national colored convention movement that began with the 1830 “National Convention of Free People of Colour held in Philadelphia, PA,” has dominated critical discussions about black nationalism and political strategy, the myriad state conventions held across the country from 1840 through the 1890s demonstrate the vast variety in black political thought and strategy and reveal the degree to which U.S. citizenship was functionally state based, not national, particularly before the Civil War.29 As I discuss in Chapter 2, these documents manifest materially what literary critics have described as “double-voiced discourse,” often speaking simultaneously to black citizens and white voters. Most visibly, the New York and Pennsylvania conventions