participation, like extra-governmental conventions, to more managed and proprietary forms of representation. To counter arguments that black people were either too irredeemably inferior or too dependent on waged and manual labor to warrant full citizenship, convention addresses built on natural rights theory and contemporaneous physics to suggest a circulatory model of civic power. Fellow citizens, they suggest, are not linked by common ancestry or political agreement but rather by their faith and participation in a republican style of government. Just as blocking access to major waterways could destroy a city, blocking the free circulation of civic power could result in either civic and social deterioration or explosive revolt among those disenfranchised.
While the male delegates to these conventions often made these claims in explicitly masculinist terms, black women nevertheless made use of the conventions to stake their own claims to participatory politics and citizenship. They lobbied for recognition in official convention spaces and were key to the convention’s material contexts, including providing the means for circulating documents for some conventions and forming auxiliary committees. The conventions allow us to track not only the arguments black activists made for citizenship but also the tensions within black collectives around gender and access to political space.100 Moreover, the printed documents associated with these conventions—the calls, debates, actual proceedings, and subsequent responses—evince a robust print culture that put the theoretical concerns about the relation between political participation and citizenship into practice.
My discussions of neighborly citizenship and the circulation of civic power reveal that citizenship practices and economics were inextricably linked. Chapter 3 turns to pseudonymous correspondences in Douglass’s Paper during the early 1850s—James McCune Smith’s “Heads of the Colored People” series and William J. Wilson’s “Letters from Our Brooklyn Correspondent”—to excavate 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
