New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization ed. by Beverly C. Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick

Abstract

Reviewed by: New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonizationed. by Beverly C. Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick Elisabeth Engel New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization. Edited by Beverly C. Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick. Southern Dissent. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2017. Pp. x, 356. $89.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-5424-7.) New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonizationrevisits the history of the movement to relocate black Americans to Africa in the nineteenth century. Its sixteen chapters focus on the American Colonization Society [End Page 729](ACS), the organization, founded in 1816, that supported African recolonization as an approach to resolve the issue of slavery by transporting free black people to Liberia. The purpose of the volume is to go beyond existing scholarship that primarily debates "whether colonization was proslavery or antislavery" (p. 17). The assembled contributions foreground, instead, the missionary, political, and diplomatic dimensions of colonizationism and new methodologies and perspectives for the study of colonization. By adopting this multidimensional approach, the volume aims to trace the "movement's complexity" while "redirecting the field and encouraging deeper analysis not only of actions but also of implications and results" (p. 17). Beverly C. Tomek's introduction discusses "The Past, Present, and Future of Colonization Studies." She offers a brief history of the ACS and a comprehensive review of the historiography since the nineteenth century, highlighting how historical interpretations of the ACS changed in certain periods, such as the civil rights era. From her discussion of the literature, Tomek drafts out where the contributors indicate potentially new fields of study. The gist of her analysis is that the contributors begin a transnational research agenda that considers ACS-related archives and historical actors in the context of American foreign policy history as well as entirely beyond the United States. This agenda is evident in contributions that bring African perspectives (such as chapters 3, 4, 11, and 13) and the place of colonization in the history of American expansion and imperialism (chapters 8 and 9) to the fore. What is less clear is how the contributions relate to or develop the concept of African American recolonization that is proposed in the title of the volume. Part 1 consists of four detailed case studies that explore the religious motivations and practices of the colonization movement in Africa. Gale L. Kenny analyzes the "missionary sensibility" of ACS supporters in New England to show that Christian ideals of sympathy and compassion helped raise a racially biased interest in black people who were well out of their sight (p. 34). Ben Wright looks into "nonspecific Protestantism" as a cultural foundation on which even conflicting groups of black and white Americans from the North and the South could agree to define colonization as a means to achieve Africans' conversion (p. 51). Andrew N. Wegmann argues that black American missionaries, starting with Lott Cary in 1822, helped breed a "populist Christian nationalism" in the interior of Liberia that differed from the Western role models that the ACS, missionary boards, and Americo-Liberian elites promoted in Monrovia (p. 83). Debra Newman Ham honors African American women as the largest segment of ACS emigrants by exploring the educational and religious initiatives that they devised on behalf of the "biblical Great Commission" to shape a new society in Liberia (p. 91). Part 2 concentrates on the colonization movement's political and diplomatic dimensions. David F. Ericson introduces the "private-public partnership" that the ACS maintained with the U.S. government due to a shared goal to suppress the transatlantic slave trade (p. 111). Daniel Preston shows that President James Monroe developed his plan of "gradual compensated emancipation linked to colonization" in view of the ACS (p. 135). Nicholas P. Wood reveals that the legalization of slavery in Missouri in 1820 eroded cross-sectional support for African colonization at the federal level, while prompting the rise of a [End Page 730]decentralized network of auxiliary colonization societies in various states. Brandon Mills argues that the ACS's idea of founding an independent black republic, as opposed to a colony, in Africa reflects an anticolonial version of U.S. expansionism. Bronwen...