Description
Book SynopsisIn 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 an
Trade Review
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 theoryand an awareness of economic historywill 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 generations 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 Citizenshipis most insightful in its analyses of the controversies over the Constitutions stance on slavery and in particular what is often called the & fugitive slave clause of the Constitution. * American Literature *
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction. "A Man from Another Country": Citizenship and the Bonds of Labor 1 Bound by Law: Apprenticeship and the Culture of "Free" Labor 2 Civic Virtues: Narrative Form and the Trial of Character in Early America 3 Fugitive Bonds: Contract and the Culture of Constitutionalism 4 Hereditary Bondsman: Frederick Douglass and the Spirit of the Law 5 "If Man Will Strike": Moby-Dick and the Letter of the Law Conclusion. The Labors of Emancipation: Founded Law and Freedom Defined Notes Index About the Author
