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@proceedings{1370983, author = {Smith, Jeffrey Alan}, booktitle = {Conference on "Sites of Citizenship," King's College, University of London}, keywords = {American literature, US race relations, Thomas Dixon, Suttton Griggs, citizenship, segregation, nationalism, Ku Klux Klan}, language = {eng}, title = {Citizenship in Secret: Hidden Sites and the Contradictions of Black and White Nationalism}, year = {2011} }
TY - CONF ID - 1370983 AU - Smith, Jeffrey Alan PY - 2011 TI - Citizenship in Secret: Hidden Sites and the Contradictions of Black and White Nationalism KW - American literature, US race relations, Thomas Dixon, Suttton Griggs, citizenship, segregation, nationalism, Ku Klux Klan N2 - 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. ER -
SMITH, Jeffrey Alan. Citizenship in Secret: Hidden Sites and the Contradictions of Black and White Nationalism. In \textit{Conference on ''Sites of Citizenship,'' King's College, University of London}. 2011.
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