Overview

In this study of literature and law from the Constitutional founding through the Civil War, Hoang Gia Phan demonstrates how American citizenship and civic culture were profoundly transformed by the racialized material histories of free, enslaved, and indentured labor. Bonds of Citizenship illuminates the historical tensions between the legal paradigms of citizenship and contract, and in the emergence of free labor ideology in American culture. Phan argues that in the age of Emancipation the cultural attributes of free personhood became identified with the legal rights and privileges of the citizen, and that individual freedom thus became identified with the nation-state. He situates the emergence of American citizenship and the American novel within the context of Atlantic slavery and Anglo-American legal culture, placing early American texts by Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Brockden Brown alongside Black Atlantic texts by Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano. Beginning with a revisionary reading of the Constitution’s “slavery clauses,” Phan recovers indentured servitude as a transitional form of labor bondage that helped define the key terms of modern U.S. citizenship: mobility, volition, and contract. Bonds of Citizenship demonstrates how citizenship and civic culture were transformed by antebellum debates over slavery, free labor, and national Union, while analyzing the writings of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville alongside a wide-ranging archive of lesser-known antebellum legal and literary texts in the context of changing conceptions of constitutionalism, property, and contract. Situated at the nexus of literary criticism, legal studies, and labor history, Bonds of Citizenship challenges the founding fiction of a pro-slavery Constitution central to American letters and legal culture.

Full Product Details

9780814771709

Table of Contents

Reviews

Phan does more than write a revisionist history, reimagining both American literary history and the long nineteenth century; his genealogy and his comparative method also gives us to understand how deeply entailed an earlier generation's discussion of slavery might be with current prattle respecting 'original intent.' An immense contribution to law and literature scholarship. -Stephen Best, University of California, Berkeley

Bonds of Citizenship is most insightful in its analyses of the controversies over the Constitution's stance on slavery and in particular what is often called the 'fugitive slave clause' of the Constitution. -American Literature Phan does more than write a revisionist history, reimagining both American literary history and the long nineteenth century; his genealogy and his comparative method give us to understand how deeply entailed an earlier generation's discussion of slavery might be with current prattle respecting 'original intent.' An immense contribution to law and literature scholarship. -Stephen Best,University of California, Berkeley Phan (Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst) provides an original look at the cultural work of nation building...Readers with a rudimentary understanding of literary and political theory-and an awareness of economic history-will be best positioned to benefit from the author's extensive research into the legal, political, and literary writing of this important era, although many audiences will profit from his synthesis of these materials. -Choice

Phan does more than write a revisionist history, reimagining both American literary history and the long nineteenth century; his genealogy and his comparative method give us to understand how deeply entailed an earlier generation's discussion of slavery might be with current prattle respecting 'original intent.' An immense contribution to law and literature scholarship. -Stephen Best,University of California, Berkeley Phan (Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst) provides an original look at the cultural work of nation building...Readers with a rudimentary understanding of literary and political theory-and an awareness of economic history-will be best positioned to benefit from the author's extensive research into the legal, political, and literary writing of this important era, although many audiences will profit from his synthesis of these materials. -Choice

"""Phan does more than write a revisionist history, reimagining both American literary history and the long nineteenth century; his genealogy and his comparative method also gives us to understand how deeply entailed an earlier generation's discussion of slavery might be with current prattle respecting 'original intent.' An immense contribution to law and literature scholarship."" Stephen Best, University of California, Berkeley"

Author Information

Hoang Gia Phan is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available