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Bonds of Citizenship : Law and the Labors of Emancipation /
The author 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 Amer...
| Autor principal: | |
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| Formato: | Electrónico eBook |
| Idioma: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
New York :
New York University Press,
[2013]
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| Colección: | Book collections on Project MUSE.
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| Temas: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Texto completo |
| Sumario: | The author 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 Crevecoeur, 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," the author 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. This book 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, this book challenges the founding fiction of a pro-slavery Constitution central to American letters and legal culture. -- Publisher's website. |
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| Descripción Física: | 1 online resource (272 pages). |
| ISBN: | 9780814738931 |