Representations of Citizenship in Antebellum African American Writing

• Citizenship has its origins not in modernity, but in the political thought and practice of the ancient Greeks and Romans. However, with the advent of the nation state in late eighteenth century, the idea of citizenship took on new meanings and started to play a crucial role in modern history. The first nation modernity produced, the United States provides an ideal setting for studying modern citizenship. The Civil War (1861-1865) was the traumatic event that marked its history. In the decades preceding it, along with American political culture and other institutions, U.S. citizenship was caught up in the whirling vortex of political, legal, and literary discourses of national identity. This paper starts from the national discourses that defined citizenship in pre-Civil War America later attempting to identify and analyze the ways in which two African American literary texts (Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) represented the idea of citizenship. The purpose is to show that the two slave narratives, which have only recently earned their position in the nineteenth century literary canon, were deeply involved in the national debate and, in spite of their presumed marginality, textually representative for the problematic idea of citizenship before the Civil War. The two narratives went far beyond mere illustration; they actively engaged the world of their readers and thus, their representations of the idea o citizenship purport to the nation’s past and future.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturstudier (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Literatures (hsv//eng)

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