Citizenship in Secret: Hidden Sites and the Contradictions of Black and White Nationalism

SMITH, Jeffrey Alan. Citizenship in Secret: Hidden Sites and the Contradictions of Black and White Nationalism. In Conference on "Sites of Citizenship," King's College, University of London. 2011.

Základní údaje

Originální název

Citizenship in Secret: Hidden Sites and the Contradictions of Black and White Nationalism

Autoři

SMITH, Jeffrey Alan

Vydání

Conference on "Sites of Citizenship," King's College, University of London, 2011

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Další údaje

Jazyk

angličtina

Typ výsledku

Prezentace na konferencích

Obor

Písemnictví, masmedia, audiovize

Stát vydavatele

Velká Británie a Severní Irsko

Utajení

není předmětem státního či obchodního tajemství

Organizační jednotka

Filozofická fakulta

Klíčová slova anglicky

American literature, US race relations, Thomas Dixon, Suttton Griggs, citizenship, segregation, nationalism, Ku Klux Klan

Štítky

American Literature, Citizenship, Ku Klux Klan, Nationalism, segregation, Suttton Griggs, Thomas Dixon, US race relations

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Anotace

V originále

This paper examines the work of two novelists from the turn of the twentieth century, one black and one white, whose sharply contrasting, almost mirror-image fictions experimented with redefining citizenship along racial lines. Both Sutton Griggs and Thomas Dixon saw the U.S. as suffering from a constitutional vacuum, an absence of legitimate authority that had left one racial group at the mercy of another. Both imagined the victimised group drawing its ‘citizens’ together in a secretive underground designed to supply the missing constitutional forms: for Griggs, the Imperium in Imperio, a fictional shadow government of and for African-Americans, and for Dixon the Ku Klux Klan, cast as heroes in the tales that later became the landmark film The Birth of a Nation. Necessarily operating from hidden sites – secluded woods, caves, a whole concealed ‘capital’ – Griggs’ and Dixon’s clandestine quasi-governments finally self-destruct, and the similar failures of these two very different ‘nations within the nation’ point, in turn, to contradictions inherent in trying to make citizenship a function of race.