Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African-American Literature

<p>Through a reading of periodicals memoirs speeches and fiction from the antebellum period to the Harlem Renaissance this study re-examines various myths about a U.S. progressive history and about an African American counter history in terms of race democracy and citizenship. Reframing 19th century and early 20th-century African-American cultural history from the borderlands of the U.S. empire where many African Americans lived worked and sought refuge Knadler argues that these writers developed a complicated and layered transnational and creolized political consciousness that challenged dominant ideas of the nation and citizenship. Writing from multicultural contact zones these writers forged a new black politics—one that anticipated the current debate about national identity and citizenship in a twenty-first century global society. As Knadler argues they defined created and deployed an alternative political language to re-imagine U.S. citizenship and its related ideas of national belonging patriotism natural rights and democratic agency. </p>