The Practice of Citizenship

Contributor: Derrick R. Spires Derrick R. Spires is Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University.

"Derrick R. Spires orchestrates insightful readings of both the most important and underutilized touchstones in early Black print studies like a master conductor. By having an array of early Black authors, events, and exchanges in play together and by amplifying how early Black writers and communities created, enlivened, and sustained collective advocacy, Spires's work is poised to significantly expand the canon of nineteenth-century texts scholars write about and teach. The Practice of Citizenship is a considerable achievement." --- "Offering a richly immersive experience, The Practice of Citizenship displaces well-known representative figures, foregrounds a diverse community of letters, and significantly increases our understanding of African American discourses of citizenship." --- "The Practice of Citizenship is a rare and important book . . . In this beautifully written and theoretically sophisticated study, the author chronicles how Black people conceived and practiced citizenship in spaces including-and perhaps especially-beyond the nation-state form . . . It is as much a theory of contested spaces as it is a philosophy of community." --- "[A]n intelligent and well-researched analysis of how writers of African descent in the New World understood and demonstrated citizenship from the late eighteenth century until the dawn of the Civil War. The Practice of Citizenship offers a robust foundation on which future generations of teachers, students, and researchers could learn more about the creativity and resolve of the African diaspora in its long quest for a citizenship they deserve rightfully and unquestionably to call their own." --- ""[E]ngaging, powerful, and absolutely necessary . . . In The Practice of Citizenship, Spires theorizes alongside some of the most brilliant and challenging writers of the nineteenth century. But with an ease made all the more impressive because of its seeming effortlessness, Spires has written a detailed and elegant book that offers his readers a well cleared pathway into the world of black theorizing in the nineteenth century, and thus provided us with an opportunity to learn from activist-writers who developed and enacted practices of citizenship that engaged with but refused to be bound by the rules and regulations of a white supremacist state. And as an interpreter of and guide through these practices, Spires models for us black theorizing in the twenty-first century, an approach that is at once scholarly method and ethical imperative. An inspired and inspiring work filled with theories and practices that are as necessary now as they were then, The Practice of Citizenship is, in short, essential reading."