Research Focus Group Talk: Dred Scott & the Retroactive Invention of Citizenship

How did Americans understand citizenship before it was defined in the 14th Amendment?
If U.S. citizenship was only defined after abolition and emancipation, how did slavery shape American citizenship?

Come and talk about these and related issues of race and civic belonging as Professor Carrie Hyde (UCLA) joins us for a brown bag discussion of the (pre-circulated) first chapter of her recent book, Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship (Harvard, 2018).

Professor Hyde’s teaching and scholarship address the dynamic connections between US literature, law, and politics in the long nineteenth century. Her first book, Civic Longing, offers a new prehistory of citizenship. It examines the central role that fiction and other imaginative traditions played in shaping emergent conceptions of “citizenship” in the period before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), when the law was not yet the default cultural tradition for asking and answering questions about citizenship. Civic Longing won the 2018 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities; it also was cited as one of the best books of 2018 in the Australian Book Review.

Please click here to access the pre-circulated paper prior to the discussion.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Slavery, Captivity, and the Meaning of Freedom Research Focus Group