NOTE: Raúl Coronado is not a current member (4/29/22).

This panel features papers that consider literary portrayals of civic rituals in early America. Citizenship is often taken to represent an abstract relationship between a subject and the state. Classic treatments of the subject are found in the disciplines of political science and political theory, and tend to focus on modern nation-states, charting the rights and responsibilities of citizens and states as early modern ideas of subjecthood evolved into modern conceptions of citizenship. Such treatments have focused heavily on political theory and documentary archives. But citizenship also has an embodied dimension. It is performed as well as possessed, and literary records of citizenship often draw their legal force as records of embodied performances--oaths, oral testimony, gestures, and enactments of many kinds. This panel, "Rites of Citizenship in Early America," seeks to portray citizenship as a civic ritual, one with performative and literary dimensions. It aims to interrogate the ways in which political belonging is enacted or renewed through embodied acts that live contested traces in the literary sphere. In shifting the focus from citizenship as a political category to citizenship as an embodied act, the panel also hopes to move beyond definitions of citizenship that place the United States at the center of history and consider instead the manifold ways early American constituencies enacted the concept before the rise of US power. Many histories of political belonging in America begin with the Puritans, but in fact early America was a world of clashing modes of belonging, from the shifting affiliations of tribal polities to the upheavals and revolutions of European colonial states. In this tumultuous world, how did early American subjects assert, enact, and defend political belonging? How did they shift allegiances and claim their rights as citizens from the many powers that struggled for control over the continent? The papers on this panel consider ritual enactments of citizenship across a range of contested sites involving diverse peoples, languages, and political cultures. Will Glover's paper considers Alqonguian tribal members who petitioned colonial states for redress and landed belonging in the seventeenth century. He shows how tribal leaders adapted their conceptions of sovereignty to gain recognition from colonial states in the wake of depopulating wars. Rachel Trocchio considers blasphemy trials of religious dissenters who interrogated the relationship between faith and political subjecthood. Her work offers a meditation on how rituals of religious confession clashed (or not) with rites of citizenship; Raúl Coronado considers the rise of print culture and revolutions of citizenship in the colonial southwest. His paper charts how the spread of print culture transformed political debates surrounding rites of citizenship such as voting. Nathaniel A. Windon considers civic rituals that provided for the indigent elderly. His paper considers end-of-life citizenship and how indigent subjects and colonial states struggled over the welfare of citizens who were viewed as economically unproductive. Taken together, the papers consider a wide range of different subjects at the margins of colonial conceptions of citizenship, yet each offers a bracing reconsideration of how citizens and states worked out their mutual obligations to one another. Each paper will be under fifteen minutes and we will leave fifteen minutes for discussion.