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.

Basic information

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

Other information

• Original language: English
• Type of outcome: Presentations at conferences
• Field of Study: Literature, mass media, audio-visual activities
• Country of publisher: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
• Confidentiality degree: is not subject to a state or trade secret
• Organization unit: Faculty of Arts
• Keywords in English: American literature, US race relations, Thomas Dixon, Suttton Griggs, citizenship, segregation, nationalism, Ku Klux Klan
• Tags: American Literature, Citizenship, Ku Klux Klan, Nationalism, segregation, Suttton Griggs, Thomas Dixon, US race relations

Abstract

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.