Colonial Africa Research Articles

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship by Christopher James Bonner

Reviewed by: Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship by Christopher James Bonner Andrew Diemer (bio) Citizenship, Slavery, African Americans, Freedom, Civil rights Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship. By Christopher James Bonner. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. 272. Cloth $34.95.) The U.S. Constitution, Christopher Bonner reminds us in the opening to this essential book, mentions the word "citizen" or "citizens" eleven times (4), and yet, just what it means by those terms and who is to be considered a [End Page 291] "citizen" was frustratingly ambiguous and would remain so for decades after the nation's founding. While this ambiguity provided reason to deny the rights of citizenship to free African Americans, it also presented opportunity, an opportunity seized upon by free Black writers and orators who, in the early decades of the republic capitalized on this ambiguity in order to stake their claim on American citizenship. Recent years have seen an outpouring of scholarship on this struggle for Black citizenship rights in the antebellum United States, which has taught us a great deal about how African Americans fought, and sometimes succeeded, in securing specific rights they broadly envisioned as the rights of citizens. Bonner's book is an essential contribution to this growing scholarship. To capture the sweep of Black politics in this era, Bonner looks to the abundant printed record of the public discourse of Black citizenship. He makes excellent use of printed accounts of speeches, meetings, and conventions and draws on the rich Black and abolitionist newspapers of the early nineteenth century. In contrast to other scholars who have focused in on a particular place in order to consider the granular details of the struggle for Black citizenship rights, Bonner pulls back the lens in order to provide the larger picture of the free Black activists of the North. What emerges is a vast network of men and women, contesting the status of free Black people, pushing to be considered as citizens in the land of their birth. The book takes up the story in the 1820s with the debate over African colonization and proceeds through six thematic but loosely chronological chapters, concluding with the legal transformations of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The first chapter considers the struggle for suffrage, which Black activists argued was an essential right owed them as American citizens. At the same time, these same activists challenged the claims of colonizationists that free Black people did not belong in the United States at all. From here the book moves on to consider the connections between Black politics and the debates over the westward expansion of the United States. Bonner offers a particularly insightful chapter on the engagement of Black activists with the European revolutions of 1848. At a time when many Black abolitionists felt alienated from the land of their birth, the revolutionary struggles unfolding across the Atlantic allowed them to imagine "new kinds of communities with new criteria for belonging," communities "defined by an individual's work toward human liberation" (75). Ultimately, though, most Black activists continued to see the land of their birth as their true home and fought for the American citizenship they believed they were owed. From here, Bonner moves on to a [End Page 292] persuasive consideration of the importance of claims of citizenship for the protection of fugitive slaves. Black abolitionists saw security as a fundamental right of citizens, and argued that jury trials and other legal protections for accused fugitive slaves were therefore guaranteed by the Constitution. Next, Bonner shows us how Roger Taney's Dred Scott decision was a response to the protest tactics of African Americans which in turn spurred Black activists to renew their struggle for the very rights that Taney claimed they could never possess. Finally, the book carries the story through the tumultuous years of the Civil War, when Black service in the Union armed forces, and the pivotal contribution of that service to the defeat of the Confederacy, left African Americans with perhaps their most persuasive argument for the citizenship rights they had long claimed. Central to Bonner's picture of this struggle for Black...

The horror of death: A Foucauldian reading of power relations in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now

Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) addresses the brutality underlying Europe’s colonisation of Africa. Its film adaptation, Apocalypse Now (1979), shows the US Army’s radical practices in the Vietnam War. A comparative study of power relations on both works will help understand the workings of power in extreme sociopolitical circumstances devoid of a democratic environment. This article analyses both cultural products under the theoretical framework of Michel Foucault’s writings on power. Three conceptual nuclei where power relations emanate are scrutinised independently: imperialism and the resulting local resistance; internal hierarchies in colonial organisations; and the role of gender. The analysis shows that absolute power is intolerable, death its ultimate limit, and confession its main liberating mechanism.

The horror of death: A Foucauldian reading of power relations in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now

Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) addresses the brutality underlying Europe’s colonisation of Africa. Its film adaptation, Apocalypse Now (1979), shows the US Army’s radical practices in the Vietnam War. A comparative study of power relations on both works will help understand the workings of power in extreme sociopolitical circumstances devoid of a democratic environment. This article analyses both cultural products under the theoretical framework of Michel Foucault’s writings on power. Three conceptual nuclei where power relations emanate are scrutinised independently: imperialism and the resulting local resistance; internal hierarchies in colonial organisations; and the role of gender. The analysis shows that absolute power is intolerable, death its ultimate limit, and confession its main liberating mechanism.

A POSTCOLONIAL READING OF AMA ATA AIDOO'S ANOWA AND MAISHE MAPONYA'S THE HUNGRY EARTH

Literature has always been read in a variety of ways, some of which struggle to uncover the latent ideologies behind its aesthetics. Postcolonial theory is, by definition, the best in this regard. This study aimed to approach Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa and Maishe Maponya's The Hungry Earth, and establish a comparison between them in the light of postcolonial perspectives. The method used in this study is qualitative, and the texts are taken from Gilbert's Postcolonial plays, which include a collection of contemporary plays considered by critics as masterpieces of postcolonial literature. This analysis showed that Anowa and The Hungry Earth are anti-colonial plays par excellence. They both mirror the cruelty and oppression of Western colonialism in Africa and reveal some of its colonial discourse and ideologies. They condemn and document the horrible aspects of discrimination and exploitation. Moreover, they both imply different strategies to resist colonialism, among which mimicry, hybridity, and armed fighting are the most highlighted. This study could be beneficial to students of postcolonial literature to build on it in their future studies. This study recommends the application of other literary theories in the analysis of these two plays, amongst them Feminism and Marxism. In addition to the postcolonial-oriented themes covered in this article, a sense of patriarchy, social inequality, and class distinction is also developed.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0936/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

‘With a minimum of bitterness’: decolonization, the right to self-determination, and the Arab-Asian group

AbstractIn the late 1940s, postcolonial elites expanded the activities of the United Nations (UN) by using it as a platform to advance decolonization and foster Third World solidarity. The Arab-Asian group was the earliest manifestation of institutional cooperation among postcolonial nations after 1945. Initially comprised of twelve Arab and Asian UN member-states, the Arab-Asian group coordinated their diplomatic activities as part of an effort to bring national self-determination to the forefront of international debate. However, the emergence of the Arab-Asian group at the UN revealed a confluence of different political ideologies and approaches to decolonization in the early postwar era. Forging a network of postcolonial elites brought out divergent visions for the postwar international order, illustrated by the frictions within the Arab-Asian group even as it played key roles in the UN debates on the questions of Indonesia, the former Italian colonies in Africa, and the Korean War. The Arab-Asian group, an important antecedent to Afro-Asianism, Third Worldism, and non-alignment, encountered challenges over parallel projects pursued by its members, such as Carlos Romulo’s campaign for a Pacific Pact among non-communist Asian states or Jawaharlal Nehru’s articulation of neutralism. Therefore, while postwar international organizations were a formative setting for the emergence of postcolonial internationalism and South-South solidarity, the common goals pursued by these states did not always translate into uniformity or consensus on decolonization.

Revolution in Uwe Timm’s Morenga: Towards a Comparative Analysis of the Herero and the German Democratic Republic Revolutions

The intersection of history and memory makes us understand that history is a product of memory and memory cannot exist without history. Although scholarship has not given much attention to it as it has to the Holocaust, Germany’s colonial past in Africa is something worth talking about. Coming in late in the colonial game, Germany still managed to acquire four colonies in Africa, namely: Cameroun, Togo, German East Africa (including present-day Burundi, Rwanda, and the mainland part of Tanzania); German South-West Africa (present-day Namibia). However, another Holocaust took place in German South-West Africa, which Germans tried to sweep under the carpet, a Holocaust that should have gotten the same attention the Holocaust against the Jews got. The Herero genocide or Holocaust came as a popular revolution against the colonial masters. There are several reasons that led to that popular revolt which led to the genocide of 85% of the Herero population. A comparative analysis of the 1989 revolution in East Germany and the Herero revolution shows many similarities and differences.This paper seeks to answer the following questions: How similar or different are the contexts of the GDR and German South-West Africa revolutions? What and how have the power dynamics led to different outcomes? What role did race play in the outcome of the two revolutions? What role did memory play in the two revolutions? Using Uwe Timm’s fictional work Morenga, which is a colonial account of Germany’s colonial past from a contemporary German, this paper argues that the Herero revolution and the GDR revolution had a common purpose: liberty but a different outcome. Within the memory and postcolonial theory framework, I show the role race played in the different outcomes.

Colonial origin, ethnicity and intergenerational mobility in Africa

• Parental ethnicity is vital to intergenerational education mobility in Africa. • Colonial ethnic administrative styles may be key in understanding differences in mobility between countries. • Effect of ethnicity is more important for mobility in former British than French colonies. • Importance of ethnicity for mobility has declined over successive birth cohorts. This paper examines the relationship between an individual’s human capital and that of their parents’ ethnic group in former British and French colonies in Africa. Using pooled cross-sectional data from eight African countries, four former French colonies (Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Madagascar, Niger) and four former British colonies (Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Uganda), we find large effects of parental ethnicity on individuals’ human capital. Our results show that colonial origin may be important in understanding intergenerational mobility in African countries via its effect on ethnic relations. Ethnic capital has a persistent effect. This effect, which could be attributed to differences in administration styles adopted during the colonial period, is higher in former British than former French colonies. Birth cohort regression analysis further shows that the ethnic effect has declined across cohorts in former British colonies while remaining comparatively static in former French colonies. Our results are robust to the use of different estimation techniques.

Review: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard

Review: <i>Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement</i>, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard

Building Nations After Empire: Post-Imperial Migrations to Portugal in a Western European Context

Building on original research and dialoguing with scholarly works on Portugal, France and the United Kingdom, this article argues that decolonisation and migrations from the (former) colonies triggered and moulded a new, post-imperial nation-building in Western Europe. Analysing the highly significant but hitherto much-neglected case of Portugal in its broader Western European context, this claim is substantiated by surveying how these migrations affected citizenship and notions of the national community, the welfare state and public memories. Comparative and relational in its approach, the article links the histories of white ‘returnees’ from Portugal's African colonies after the 1974 Carnation Revolution to those of non-white ‘immigrants’, arguing that we must situate in the same analytical field all those who migrated from (formerly) colonised territories to the metropole during the drawn-out end of empire.

Africanized honeybee population (Apis mellifera L.) in Nicaragua: Forewing length and mitotype lineages.

Various subspecies of Apis mellifera L. were introduced to Central America since colonization 500 years ago. Hybridization increased with the entrance of the Africanized bee in Nicaragua in 1984. Rustic beekeeping activities and numerous feral swarms define the genetic pattern, reflected in phenotypic heterogeneity and remarkable differences in the behaviour of the bee colonies, especially the nest defence. Due to these facts, the question emerge about the degree of Africanization of honeybee colonies in Nicaragua. In this study, we identified Africanized honeybee colonies based on the single character "mean forewing length" and we corroborated our results by determining mitotypes using mtDNA analysis. Morphometric and genetic approaches were realized in three different geographical zones of Nicaragua and related to beehive characteristics and management. Worker bee samples were taken from the inside of 146 hives from 26 apiaries. Abdominal colour as phenotypic character was the first examination, followed by measurement of 1460 right forewings to determine corresponding probability of Africanization. More than 60% of the beehives showed phenotypic heterogeneity and mean forewing length of 8.74 mm (SD 0.16 mm) indicated a high degree of Africanization. Those results provided a selection of 96 worker bees to perform PCR of two worker bees per hive. For mitochondrial DNA analysis 14 samples from sentinel apiaries were added. Three from 61 beehives presented bees with different mtDNA. Throughout, three mitotypes of the African (A) lineage were detected; one mitotype is still unidentified. Mitotype A1 A. mellifera iberiensis was represented by 88 bees and mitotype A4 A. mellifera scutellata by 21 bees. Phylogenetic analysis confirmed the PCR findings. No associations were found between mitotypes, forewing length, beehive characteristics and management. A high degree of Africanization in A. mellifera colonies represented by two predominating mitotypes from the A lineage, prevail in Neotropical Nicaragua, with mitotype A4 predominating at higher altitudes.

A Preliminary Solution to the Indigenous Issues in South Africa Colony

South Africa is an important colony in the colonial territory of the British Empire. In the process of British colonization, the nonstandard management and unconstrained colonial behavior caused considerable troubles and injuries to the indigenous people. Evangelical Thomas Fowell Buxton and missionary John Phillips contributed to solving the local indigenous problems. The indigenous problems in Cape colony promoted the establishment of the select committee on Aborigines (British settlements), which gave relevant suggestions to solve the indigenous problems in South Africa, and to some extent eased the contradiction between colonists and indigenous people.

“En el principio era el verbo”: la escritura de Resistencia e identidad en las producciones de la Casa de los Estudiantes del Imperio

In the heart of the metropolis, between 1944 and 1965, the House of the Students of the Empire was responsible for the formation of a part of the African intellectuality that fought against Portuguese colonialism in Africa. Personalities such as Amílcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto among others would become fundamental characters in this fight against oppression. The aim of this article is to analyze some poems produced by members of the House which are compiled in the Antologias de Poesia da Casa dos Estudantes do Império, highlighting Angolan writers. Moreover, for a better understanding it is necessary a historical contextualization of the House and its role in the formation of an anticolonial and identity consciousness for these members, which would echo in the future in their countries of origin.

Decolonising Christian based ‘Prophetship’. A Pragma-Dialectic Analysis of Re/presentations of Faith Healing and Faith Healers in Zimbabwean Newspapers

Contemporary Christianity in Zimbabwe and Africa at large, is characterized by a surge ‘prophetness’ and prophetic faith healing. These faith based, miracle performing and faith based healing agents and actors and their theologies have received immense media attention in Zimbabwean media. This study examines representations of faith healers in Zimbabwean newspapers, the English language reporting national dailies, The Herald and Daily News as well as the Shona language reporting tabloid, Kwayedza couched within the extended Pragma-Dialectic Theory (Van Eemeren, Grootendorst &amp; Henkemans, 1996). The theory provides explications that enable the current enquiry to examine issues related to faith healing in line with the political, economic and the social contexts that shape the system in which faith based healers find themselves. Recognising and arguing that Christian faith healing is a colonial phenomenon which culminates from the colonisation of Africa, the study examines media representations of the phenomenon within these frames. In examining the manners in which ideological positions as enunciated in news reports (which ideally are supposed to be free from such ideological biases), the study will adopt the four stages which a critical discussion contains, which are: “…[firstly], the confrontation stage (where the difference of opinion manifest itself); [secondly]…the opening stage (where the procedural and material points of departure for a critical discussion about a standpoint at an issue are established);… [third] is the argumentation stage (where the standpoints are challenged and defended; last, the fourth stage is the concluding stage (where the results of the discussion are determined)” (Van Eemeren &amp; Houtlosser, 2003). The research adopts a qualitative research paradigm and data is discussed through the use of textual analysis. The study observes that Christian faith healers receive both positive and negative media representation. In the observed instances, positive representation of the Christian agents and their trade is dictated by the social alignment they have to Christianity in a predominantly Christian nation and negative representations emanate from the observations that their healing systems embrace the African conceptualisation of disease and illness – which to some seem unChristian.

Review: Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa, by T.J. Tallie

Review: <i>Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa</i>, by T.J. Tallie

“Does Adwa have a Colonial Legacy? Assessing the viability of the Colonial Thesis for Understanding Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Ethiopia”

For many, the Ethiopian victory at Adwa was an African victory over European colonialism, but some scholars have reimagined the triumph as an example of African colonialism in recent years. This view culminates in the colonial thesis. This colonial thesis casts Menilek II of Shäwa (r.1888-1913) as a colonizer of Southern groups in present-day Ethiopia and posits his state as a foreign colonial power. This view is one of the theoretical underpinnings of the present Ethiopian ethnic federalism and many ethnolinguistic nationalist movements. One of the ways that it impacts identities, as the Ethiopian scholar Maimire Mennasemay puts it, “. . . ontologizes ethnic identity and falsely represents Ethiopia as a collection of discrete, ethnic communities, brought together by ‘Amhara colonialism.’” The scholar Mahmoud Mamdani builds on this view by arguing that transforming identities (politicizing nativity) was essential in governing colonial empires. In other words, the colonial government invented settlers and natives in their territories and treated them accordingly. In essence, this essay details the identities that were produced as a result of Ethiopia’s victory at Adwa and argues that while oppression accompanied the conquest of territories North, East, West, and South of Menilek’s native Shäwan province, Menilek’s government did not produce identities to make power exclusive for one group as displayed at both the participation at the battle and in the administration that the victory preserved.

The Retornados from the Portuguese Colonies in Africa: Memory, Narrative, and History, Elsa Peralta (ed.) (2022)

Review of: The Retornados from the Portuguese Colonies in Africa: Memory, Narrative, and History, Elsa Peralta (ed.) (2022) London: Routledge, 442 pp., ISBN 978-0-36770-399-8, h/bk, £120.00 ISBN 978-1-00314-615-5, e-book, £33.29

Beyond Agency: The African Peasantry, the State, and Tobacco in Southern Rhodesia (Colonial Zimbabwe), 1900–80

AbstractThis paper examines African peasant tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia from 1900 to 1980, from the cusp of colonialism to its end. It analyses shifting state policy towards African tobacco producers, the concomitant impact on peasant economies, accumulation patterns and the rural physical landscape and peasant responses. It focuses on the changing agricultural commodity value chains, cash crop asymmetries, and global market forces to explain colonial responses to peasant production and peasant agency. We argue that the symbolic value of each agricultural commodity, in entrenching the hierarchy of power relations and the institutionalisation of white control, mediated colonial responses to peasant production and concomitantly ‘peasant agency’. We use this case study to highlight the structural constraints on ‘agency’ and to explore how cash crop asymmetries helped structure agrarian encounters and power relations in colonial Africa. The paper uses archival sources from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, newspapers, and journals from the Tobacco Research Board (TRB).

Science, Policy, and Development in Africa: Challenges and Prospects by R. Sooryamoorthy

Reviewed by: Science, Policy, and Development in Africa: Challenges and Prospects by R. Sooryamoorthy Cathy Skidmore-Hess Sooryamoorthy, R. Science, Policy, and Development in Africa: Challenges and Prospects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Opening with the statement, "A great deal is written and known about Africa but not much about science from Africa, or what Africa can give to science" (1), Science, Policy, and Development in Africa posits that Africa-based science would benefit the global production of scientific knowledge as well as individual nations. Sooryamoorthy, a sociologist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, has written extensively on technology and science in South Africa as well as the role of science in development in both colonial and postcolonial Africa, and he argues for the need to integrate locally produced science into Africa's development plans. For Sooryamoorthy, it is critical to create knowledge and technological capacity, because production of scientific knowledge is necessary to obtain international funding and is a key component of economic growth. As the gap between rich and poor countries widens in terms of knowledge production, the gap in economic development and wealth also increases. However, national development policies of African countries still contain very little focus on science and technology. To remedy this, Sooryamoorthy suggests that science and development policies be more closely aligned with the objectives expressed in national development plans. He also argues for more African-centered scientific programs. [End Page 226] Science, Policy, and Development in Africa makes a strong argument for the development and use of Africa's human capital. Higher population produces greater demand for technology and a larger amount of human capital from which to draw new methods and invention. Lack of appreciation for scientific research also means that an insufficient number of people know how to carry out scientific research (234). Part of the development of human capital involves the creation of more African scientists and more development plans based in science. This requires institutional capacity. According to Sooryamoorthy, the African continent has a poor record of building institutions for development and advancement. To balance technology transfer, and with science developed locally, education is key. African governments need to rely less on foreign capital and make more use of indigenous knowledge, not just in agriculture and medicine but in development more broadly. This means incorporating local knowledge into the formal education system and breaking with some of the patterns created by history and global capital. Sooryamoorthy notes that under colonialism, scientific inquiry was focused on solving the problems of the colonizers, but he focuses his analysis on the postcolonial period and the challenges to Africanizing science. During the 1960s and 1970s, newly independent African countries often needed to develop institutions, such as universities. These universities were, in turn, concerned with the "Africanisation of research, creation of academic positions and expansion of scientific establishments" (45). However, the global recession of the 1970s and a dip in oil prices slowed the production of science, confined it to universities and the public sector, and limited the growth of universities and the public sector as well. This downturn slowed the Africanization of and growth of African science, because scientific development and collaboration is linked with the growth of universities, the number of students enrolled in the sciences, and gross domestic expenditure on research and development (GERD) (85). Sooryamoorthy's analysis indicates a high correlation between scientific production, wealth, and collaboration with the global scientific community. However, while essential, collaboration is often exploitative in the African context as "Africa is often mined for resources of interest to the international community, and African scientists become the under-recognized workers who collect those resources" (195–96). In regard to this and failures in development policy, Sooryamoorthy notes that the problems of science and technology (S&T) on the continent are twofold: first, social systems of science have not been able to attract "sufficient [End Page 227] political legitimacy" and international cooperation; and second, international aid cannot "replace local and national support in harnessing S&T for development" (285). To develop Africa's human potential and "science from Africa," a policy shift is also important. Sooryamoorthy makes use of Andrew Moravcsik's distinction between policy with science...

Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard

Reviewed by: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Sara C. VanderHaagen Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-4968-2383-0 While often dismissed as a straightforward failure, arguments advocating the removal of free Black Americans to Africa are rhetorically significant: they continued for more than fifty years, engaged white and Black Americans alike, and powerfully shaped understandings of Blackness and Black communities into the twentieth century. As I have found when [End Page 213] teaching courses on the African American rhetorical tradition, the shadow of this discourse lurks in the words of speakers from Sojourner Truth to Marcus Garvey. Its presence—much less its rationale—can be difficult to explain. Bjørn F. Stillion Southard’s excellent book helps to address that challenge by offering a rich, complex analysis of this persistent occurrence of “peculiar rhetoric.” Beginning with speeches given at the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816, the first chapter examines what Stillion Southard calls the “peculiar argumentation” of colonization’s founding advocates. These speakers’ arguments in favor of colonization were shaped (or, more accurately, misshaped) by their effort to appeal to two diametrically opposed audiences: southern slaveholders and northern abolitionists. Attempts to meet such a strange rhetorical task left key ideas in what Stillion Southard terms “jangling relation” (33) to one another and opened the ACS to critiques from all sides. Although the ACS treated free Black Americans as “objects of the scheme, not subjects to be addressed” (25), as the author astutely notes, it is not difficult to imagine that they would have had strong opinions about the proposal. Chapter two explores a response to the founding of the ACS whose authorship was attributed to the “Free People of the District of Columbia.” Because the authorship of this text cannot be clearly identified, Stillion Southard focuses instead on its “peculiar voice” in order to demonstrate that it is “hermeneutically diasporic; it both belongs to and flees from familiar interpretive frames” (42). The analysis deftly deploys familiar rhetorical concepts, such as polysemy, in unfamiliar ways in order to draw out the text’s three voices: serious, ironic, and signifying. Each of these three voices suggests a different set of authors and distinct purposes vis-à-vis colonization. While the analysis provides solid evidence for all three voices, I found the discussion of signifying most insightful and potentially productive for scholars seeking to understand and amplify Black voices from the past. The concept of signifying used by Stillion Southard, while departing slightly from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s variation, “signifyin’,” reveals a compelling insight: “Being black and subversive was much more difficult in public discourse than being white and ironic” (57). Further evidence of that insight appears in chapters three and four, which focus on texts produced by Black colonists. Chapter three examines the “negotiation of blackness, power, and material conditions” (66) in free Black landowner Louis Sheridan’s correspondence with the ACS and his eventual emigration to Liberia. Adapting Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of planning in the face of “exclusionary forces” (66), Stillion Southard demonstrates how colonization discourse created limited possibilities for free Blacks who sought to emigrate and reveals the inventive ways in which these individuals rhetorically negotiated their severely constrained subjectivity in the face of limitations. This analysis effectively engages both Afro-Pessimist and Black optimist thought, which compellingly illustrates Sheridan’s own journey from optimism to pessimism as a result of his “peculiar planning for emigration. The focus on Black subjectivity is critical here, [End Page 214] as it helps to show how one individual Black person experienced and responded to the peculiar machinations of a colonization scheme that treated him as “neither slave nor free” (71). Chapter four turns to a more empowered settler colonist, Hilary Teage. Just before the Republic of Liberia declared independence in 1847, Teage gave two speeches that constituted “settler colonist civic identity” by outlining, respectively, their “peculiar obligation to debate” and their “peculiar obligation to commemorate” (89; emphasis in original...

ÇUKUROVA STRATEGY OF FRANCE IN THE NATIONAL STRUGGLE PERİOD

After the second half of the 18th century; the imperialist policies of the states such as England, Russia and Austria on the Ottoman Empire, caused significant changes in France's strategy in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. Although the Ottoman Empire tried to carry out its foreign policy with its balance policies until the end of the century, it couldn’t prevent the transfer of population to the western states in order to establish colonies under the name of commercial activities in its territory. The privileges granted by the capitulations with the 1839 Tanzimat and 1856 Islahat edicts, known as the enactment movements in the Ottoman Empire, increased the population of a new western settler dealing with trade under the name of "Levantine (eastern)" in the Ottoman lands. As well as the missionary schools opened in the region with this population, organized and supported by the separatist Arab population in Lebanon and Jordan. Despite the great defeat of the Ottoman Emperor against Russia in 1878 and the subsequent Berlin Congress, France set its sights on the North African lands (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt) and occupied them one by one. Although this occupation, France had to withdraw from Egypt, three years later, which was on the eastern trade route of England. By the First World War, France's eastern strategy became clear with the Sykes-Picot Agreement signed between two other allies, England and Russia. Along with Syria and Lebanon, France seized the opportunity to gain control over Çukurova, which has become a center of attraction for the French Levantines since 1860 and also the raw material warehouse of many industrial products. The occupation of this region, which was of vital importance for the French industry, which lost most of its Western and African colonies to England, would be a very valuable gain. The aim of this study is to analyze the strategy of the Çukurova Region, which was the basis of France's eastern strategy and also was occupied by the Syria Alliance with Britain after the First World War.