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 I analyze issued addresses to “colored fellow citizens” and “to the people of the state,” often printed in the same document. These addresses mixed defiance with deference politics as convention delegates, on one hand, entreated black citizens not to lose faith in their advocacy and to continue working for their own uplift as proof of civic worth and, at the same time, excoriated white voters for demanding arbitrary proofs for rights that by law and principle should belong to black citizens as a matter of course. At the same time, these addresses could hint at, if not outright announce, calls to revolution and/or separation if white voters refused to heed delegates’ reasoned arguments. Often, convention addresses made these moves simultaneously, sometimes within the same sentence.
Other forms, such as the sketches, short fiction, and poetry published in black and antislavery periodicals and newspapers, did equally important theoretical work. Many of the pieces in the Anglo-African Magazine, the short-lived magazine founded by Thomas and Robert Hamilton in 1859, were not explicitly about (concerned with) citizenship in the sense that they made arguments for black citizenship or challenged particular laws (though some did that). Yet they were about citizenship in the sense that they interrogated and modeled citizenship practices. When Wilson introduced Ethiop in the “Afric-American Picture Gallery” as someone meditating on U.S. and black American history through art and through his writing about art, he also introduced readers to a mode of critique essential to citizenship. Harper’s Jane Rustic, the pseudonymous narrator of her “Fancy Sketches” series, similarly models a mode of citizenship-as-critique when she consistently interrupts the “tomfoolery” of the men who engaged in discussions about black liberation as an elite rhetorical pastime.
Reading black print as a space where citizenship was both theorized and practiced—that is, as both archive and repertoire—reveals the degree to which black theories of citizenship unfold through a highly creative and diverse community of letters, not easily reducible to representative figures or genres. I borrow from Diana Taylor’s Archive and Repertoire (2003) not to expand the meaning of “repertoire” to the point of incoherence or to erase the distinction between archive and repertoire but rather to think through how print, when read less as an end point or a medium that fixes meaning and more as one element among several at the time of production, becomes a space where writers engaged in processes that created citizenship, knowledge, and power in a nation that denied both their citizenship and print culture. Though the texts black writers produced are an archive insofar as they record thoughts, events, and proceedings, black print culture—the creation, circulation, and consumption of these texts—constitutes an ongoing performance that we can read as a repertoire. These texts were not static documents, as the convention proceedings reveal most clearly; instead, they involved, among other things, public gatherings, oral delivery, recording, public debate in print and in person, and varying vectors into print and into variously constituted print publics. Insofar as the black state conventions were a performance, to stay with this one example, this performance extended beyond the meetings themselves to include conversations about the conventions in print and in local gatherings, the choreographed presentation of convention documents to the public in the form of proceedings, and the ongoing discussion of the convention and its documents, again, in print and in local gatherings. This complex interaction between print and embodied action constitutes a unique performance that is different in each instance.
In this sense, these texts, when taken as part of a larger cultural formation, belong to those practices “rehearsed and performed daily in the public sphere” that include, for Diana Taylor, “civic obedience, resistance, citizenship, gender, ethnicity, and sexual identity.”30 In the context of black theorizing, writing and publication are part of the “cultural practices” Taylor cites alongside “embodied practice” that offer “a way of knowing,” a way of theorizing.31 I extend Taylor’s thinking to situate black theorizing as a practice depending on both embodied expression and print. This is not to say that one is consistently privileged over the other or that the distribution of work between print and embodied performance is even, but rather to highlight how the two were always enmeshed. Other kinds of embodied culture—street fashion, slave escapes, acts of civil disobedience, antislavery violence, storytelling, and so on—that were happening remain crucial lines of inquiry. At the same time, this study is interested in how black theorizing mobilized and conceptualized print as a site of knowledge production and a site of resistance that could destabilize white supremacist citizenship. By thinking of individual instances of black theorizing as a repertoire and the aggregate as an archive, I mean to signal each moment as a unique complex of textual production, circulation, and reception (imagined and actual) and at the same time to acknowledge my own position as an observer collecting and shaping a narrative out of these sites, a position I share with the writers I’m analyzing insofar as we are both engaged in the theorizing process.
“Can These Dry Bones Live?” Reading Citizenship Reparatively
Throughout this book, then, I emphasize theorizing over conclusive definitions, seeking forms rather than identifying a singular tradition, and articulating citizenship practices instead of defining formal citizenship status.32 Black writers and activists saw great potential in U.S. framing ideals—its civic republicanism, the comingling of peoples and ideas, and shared sovereignty—but they also recognized that these same ideals could and did accommodate systems of oppression as readily as they did egalitarian polity. U.S. citizenship was a “beautiful but baneful object”: beautiful in its potential realization of “E pluribus unum” and baneful because enslavement and other exclusionary practices not only limited the capacity to imagine this potential but also were integral to conceptions of citizenship’s beauty.33 In this sense, black theories of citizenship were both critical—defamiliarizing the ostensible naturalness of what citizenship was becoming—and reparative in their articulation of what might have been and what could still be. In calling these theories “reparative,” I draw on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s description of reparative reading: “[a] position from which it is possible in turn to use one’s own resources to assemble or ‘repair’ the murderous part-objects into something like a whole—though not, and may I emphasize this, not necessarily like any preexisting whole. Once assembled to one’s own specifications, the more satisfying object is available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn.”34 While the “more satisfying object”—that is, a just and equal citizenship—may never be achieved, the point is to identify and reconstruct (or, in some cases, construct anew) methods for working toward it. Hortense Spillers articulates this point from a slightly different angle directly connected to the twinned acts of speaking and writing and in the context of a larger black feminist project. “In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meaning,” she notes. This stripping down is not an end, and the outcome is not given; rather, it is the necessary preparatory work that will allow her/us to “await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness.”35 The power of this stance is in the energies black theorizing marshals and the “room” it creates “to realize that the future may be different from the present” and that the past could have happened differently.36
This stance finds its expression in speech and print as a collective imaginative
