Hoang Phan

Hoang Gia Phan received his B.A. in English from the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

His fields of research and teaching are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, African American literature, and Asian American Literature.

In this study of literature and law from the Constitutional founding through the Civil War, Phan demonstrates how American citizenship and civic culture were profoundly transformed by the racialized material histories of free, enslaved, and indentured labor.Bonds of Citizenship illuminates the historical tensions between the legal paradigms of citizenship and contract, and in the emergence of free labor ideology in American culture.

Phan 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 Crèvecœur, 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,” Phan 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. Bonds of Citizenship 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,Bonds of Citizenship challenges the founding fiction of a pro-slavery Constitution central to American letters and legal culture.

Phan also serves as Director of the Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC) program.

• African, African American, & African Diaspora
• American, Atlantic, & Hemispheric Studies
• American Literature, Asian American & Asian Diaspora
• Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies
• Marxist Literary Studies

• Bonds of Citizenship: Law and the Labors of Emancipation (NYU Press, 2013)
• “Imagined Territories: Comparative Racialization and the Accident of History in Wong Kim Ark.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, vol. 39, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 21-38.
• “‘A race so different’: Chinese Exclusion, the Slaughterhouse Cases, and Plessy v. Ferguson.”Labor History vol. 45, no. 2 (May 2004): 133-163.
• “Free Subjects: Black Civic Identity and the Invention of the Asiatic.” Law & Humanities eJournal (September 2003)