The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires Peter Wirzbicki (bio) Keywords Print culture, Citizenship, African American thinkers, Political theory, Literary analysis The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. By Derrick R. Spires. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 314. Cloth, $49.95.) Derrick Spires, an associate professor of English at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, wrote The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States in part to respond to the sense that discussions about print culture, the public sphere, and democratic deliberation had left out black participants and visions. The resulting work, though, is far more interesting than if Spires simply had applied the theories of Jürgen Habermas or others to early African American literature. Instead he develops his own theory of how black thinkers and writers developed what he calls a "practice of citizenship." Scholars working on black radicalism, American print culture, and antebellum politics will find this a provocative and fruitful read. The book uses a rich diversity of sources, a wide array of theoretical perspectives from [End Page 379] contemporary critical theory, and close readings of both well-known and sometimes unfamiliar sources to establish that antebellum black thinkers were developing novel ways to think about power and citizenship through engagement with a literary public sphere. At the center of Spires's argument is a convincing and important re-theorization of citizenship. Black thinkers and activists in the antebellum period—men and women like Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, James McCune Smith, William J. Wilson, Francis Watkins Harper, and many others—conceived of citizenship, he argues, less as a formal legal right defined by the state and more as a practice, something that is produced through energetic and engaged political activism, especially through an assertive print culture. Black thinkers conceived of citizenship as what you do, in other words, not who you are or how the state sees you. By adding a valuable literary-studies perspective to such recent historiographical studies of the history of citizenship by legal historians like Barbara Welke and Martha Jones, Spires's work shows how the creation of citizenship was a cultural and literary project as much as a political one. The black press plays a central role in this construction of citizenship. Spires sees the emergence of a black print culture as a central "space" in which "black writers constituted community outside of the nation-state form" (9). It was in pamphlets, newspapers, and short fiction that black writers theorized these new practices of citizenship. He begins in the immediate post-revolutionary period with an analysis and discussion of the "neighborly" ethos that black Philadelphians preached in the wake of the famous yellow-fever epidemic of 1793. Spires argues that black Philadelphians sought to mobilize under the hegemonic banner of civil republicanism while simultaneously expanding this notion of civic virtue by incorporating "neighborliness," a trait that had a "more democratic ethos of equality and inclusion" than white thinkers tended to (56). The relatively restrained and deferential citizenship of Jones and Allen is soon supplanted by the more assertive "circulating" citizenship of the Colored Convention movement. Spires shows how accounts of these conventions were meant to be printed and published, "circulating" well beyond their immediate contexts. Historians may be interested in how Spires centers debates about state citizenship, in contrast to some historiographical interpretations that have tended to focus on the creation of [End Page 380] national citizenship. Black thinkers also increasingly engaged with questions about "economic citizenship." Spires discusses debates between William J. Wilson and James McCune Smith about "black aristocracy" and the "best average colored citizen" (143). Together, Spires shows that a rich and vibrant debate about the meaning of republicanism, market life, and economic citizenship occurred in the black press. Next, Spires turns his attention to "critical citizenship," especially as modeled by the briefly lived Anglo-African Magazine. For Spires, "critical citizenship" disrupts and unsettles otherwise fixed and unified norms of white supremacy and white citizenship. Critical citizenship is "intrusive"; it invades the settled spaces of white politics that seek to...