Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
James Andrew Whitaker
(Troy University)
Andrew Wegmann (Delta State University)
Luisa Schneider (University of Bayreuth)
Shawn Lambert (Mississippi State University)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
James Andrew Whitaker
(Troy University)
- Discussants:
-
Shawn Lambert
(Mississippi State University)
Andrew Wegmann (Delta State University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Imagining ‘Africanness’
- Location:
- S67 (RW I)
- Sessions:
- Monday 30 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
This panel examines identity, historical memory, and material culture in Liberia. It focuses on African perspectives, archival analyses, and archaeological research. The papers fit within the "Imagining Africanness" stream at the meeting point of local and foreign archives and cultures.
Long Abstract:
This panel examines identity, historical memory, heritage, and material culture in Liberia using cross-disciplinary approaches. The panel is situated within the "Imagining Africanness" stream and centers around understanding a historically significant reverse-diasporic ethnic group in Liberia. It also contributes to the "Perspectives on Current Crises" stream, due to the relevance of these themes to past civil conflicts in Liberia. The American settlers and their descendants are historiographically positioned as elites and ultimately outsiders in West Africa, but their mutual perceptions with Indigenous Liberians have been insufficiently examined. We welcome papers that consider a broad range of past and present African perspectives (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) concerning these and related themes, as well as the relations that both constitute and configure them within Liberia. We are particularly interested in work that explores how such knowledge is situated, produced, and reproduced in social interactions, lived experiences, constructions of heritage, archival collections, material culture, and archaeological sites both in West Africa and abroad. Concerning knowledge production, our research on these themes has combined ethnographic fieldwork in Liberia with archaeological excavations, artifact analysis and curation, and archival analyses. As convenors, we are specialized in the fields of social anthropology, history, archaeology, and African studies. We welcome contributions from these or related academic fields. We especially welcome contributions from scholars in Africa.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 30 September, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines historical memory in Sinoe County, Liberia. Based on fieldwork in Liberia, it highlights how historical settlement, interethnic relations, and conflict are remembered in Sinoe County today. It explores how social relations and positions influence oral histories and hybrid memory.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the persistence and ambiguity of historical memory in Sinoe County, Liberia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in in Greenville, Lexington, Louisiana, and Monrovia in 2022, it highlights the diverse ways in which the historical settlement of Liberia, interethnic relations between Americo-Liberians and Indigenous groups, and the era surrounding the Liberian coup and subsequent civil conflicts (1980-2003) are remembered today in Sinoe County. Historical memory of these eras and events sometimes varies among settlers' descendants and Indigenous people, but the differences are more ambiguous than often acknowledged. The paper discusses how intermarriage, formal education, and Americo-Liberian practices of adopting and raising Indigenous children complicate these narratives. Hybrid accounts emerge that go beyond the classic divisions, separating "Americo-Liberian" and "Indigenous" perspectives, which often continue to structure Liberian historiography. Historical memory provides a discursive space in which identities and understandings are constructed, reproduced, and contested among contemporary Liberians and through which local meanings are formed that help to elucidate the past and present.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that Liberia itself, and the settlers who made up the Americo-Liberian class consciously embraced the legacy of the colonial identity and national imagination written across the heart of the American experiment whence it all came.
Paper long abstract:
In 1822, a group of freeborn African Americans constructed a colonial city in West Africa. Called Monrovia after the American president who helped fund the venture, the city became its own metropole—the center of a world deliberately mirroring the one that had rejected it and its people, a palimpsest of the white “American experiment.” The city, as it grew into the capital of a new nation declared free and independent in 1847, begat a cultural—and indeed racial—standard rooted in a distinctly American historical memory, one reinforced by a national rhetoric of faithful pilgrimage, Christian enlightenment, and missionary fervor. Echoing the same justifications and archival images drawn by the European “peopling,” conquest, and enslavement of the New World, this rhetoric lay at the heart of what became an “Americo-Liberian” identity as well as the vision of national piety and destiny it enacted in the creation of the young Liberian republic. This paper tracks the development of this colonial palimpsest in Liberia generally and Monrovia specifically. It argues that Liberia itself, and the settlers-then-citizens who made up the Americo-Liberian class in the Liberian metropole, consciously embraced—and even celebrated—the legacy of providential colonial identity and national imagination first born in European conquests of the New World and written across the heart of the American experiment whence it all came.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will examine the potential for innovative uses of biological anthropology to elucidate paths of migration, relatedness, and identity in Liberia. It considers the fraught relations of biology in a field of identity by exploring a non-reductionistic approach regarding medical humanities.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will examine the potential for innovative uses of biological anthropology to help elucidate paths of migration, relatedness, and identity in Liberia. In preparation for future multidisciplinary fieldwork in Liberia, which will use all four fields of anthropology to investigate flows of material culture, memory, and genetics between Mississippi and Mississippi in Africa, this paper will discuss how DNA sampling (using minimally invasive cheek swabbing) can contribute to research on early settlement, marital practices, and group membership in Sinoe County. It will also consider the fraught relations of biology in a field of identity by exploring a non-reductionistic approach resonant with the growing multidisciplinary field of medical humanities. For many Liberians today, the identity of settlers and their descendants often focuses on forms of fashion, speech, and other practices. In the past, it was often associated with descent, adoption, and education. There is a gap in the academic literature on biological relatedness in Americo-Liberian communities and social constructions of identity. This paper will explore this gap while examining the potential of biological anthropology for making ethically sound, non-reductionistic contributions to multidisciplinary research concerning the broader African Diaspora. It complements other papers in this panel through a contrastive focus on biological relatedness and its meanings in local constructions of Americo-Liberian identity and belonging. Asserting the primacy of neither culture nor nature, it explores how new uses of biological anthropology can add useful dimensions to such multidisciplinary research.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I discuss the features and material culture recovered from a public archaeology excavation at the Prospect Hill plantation site in the summer of 2023.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I first discuss the features and material culture recovered from our two-week public archaeology excavation at the Prospect Hill plantation site in the summer of 2023. For this community- engaged project, we focused our excavation efforts on a structure just eight meters southwest of the main house. The material culture and features documented reveal that the structure was an enslaved dwelling and/or kitchen house, which makes sense due to the structure’s proximity to the main house as well as early labeled maps of Prospect Hill’s building layout. Furthermore, we explain how the artifacts recovered within this structural feature highlight the daily lives of enslaved life at Prospect Hill. Next, with our collaborative work with the descendant communities of Prospect Hill in Liberia, we discuss their historical and cultural ties to Mississippi. Finally, we discuss how the theory of inalienability gives new insights into enslaved life in Mississippi and critical cultural heritage connections today.
Paper short abstract:
This paper scrutinises Liberia's national holiday calendar and its linkages to the politics of memory. Predominantly rooted in African Diaspora heritage, these state-endorsed memorializations are subject to contestation, (dis-) continuity and redefinition as a performance of socio-political change.
Paper long abstract:
National holidays function as pivotal cultural markers, condensed moments of nation-building (Lentz and Becker 2013), and time machines that carry significant meanings of the past in the present. Liberia, with its unique transnational history as one of the first African republics to gain independence as a settler colony in 1847, is still reckoning with its hotly contested national historiography, and state policies have yet to establish common ground for an inclusive national representation of Liberia's diverse heritage.
Profound socio-political transformations have led to contested, discontinued, and newly initiated commemorations. These shifts reflect evolving perspectives on belonging, nationhood, and the components of national culture—values, aesthetics, and ideologies represented in the national heritage canon. Public discourses, both digital and offline, call for a re-evaluation of the very notion of "national," considering the historical emphasis on predominantly African Diaspora heritage and narratives in the national agenda of memorialization.
Within a more and more globalized and mediatized world, the performance of national holidays through state-led commemoration remains central to the question: Whose heritage is represented and from which perspective? What are the implications for the politics of memory in Liberia and beyond?
Looking at the calendar in a broad sense what historical, religious, cultural, and political symbols and values, are significant for the nation's identity? What intersections exist between Mathilda Newport Day (discontinued since the 1980s), Joseph Jenkins Roberts' Birthday, and the commemoration of the "Bicentennial of the Transatlantic Returning" in 2022?