Bonds of Citizenship: Law and the Labors of Emancipation Contributor(s): Phan, Hoang Gia (Author) |
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ISBN: 0814738478 ISBN-13: 9780814738474 Publisher: New York University Press OUR PRICE: $88.11 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: April 2013 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - History | United States - 19th Century - Political Science | Civics & Citizenship - Social Science | Ethnic Studies - African American Studies |
Dewey: 342.730 |
LCCN: 2012035343 |
Series: America and the Long 19th Century |
Physical Information: 0.75" H x 6" W x 9" (1.18 lbs) 272 pages |
Themes: - Chronological Period - 19th Century - Ethnic Orientation - African American - Topical - Black History |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: 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 Cr vecoeur, 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Phan, Hoang Gia: - Hoang Gia Phan is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. |