Sponsor
English
“The Practice of Citizenship: A Conversation Between Derrick Spires and Jarvis McInnis
Tuesday, March 30,
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Speaker(s): Derrick Spires, Associate Professor English at Cornell University
Duke English and the Ad Hoc Committee on Anti-Racism invite you to join them for a conversation between Professors Jarvis McInnis and Derrick R. Spires on the topic of Professor Spires' prize-winning book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States.
Conversation Topic: In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does. In The Practice of Citizenship, Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. The Practice of Citizenship will be the focus of the conversation.
Conversation Topic: In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does. In The Practice of Citizenship, Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. The Practice of Citizenship will be the focus of the conversation.
