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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Paper short abstract:

Princeton Seminary was central to the American Colonization Society and founding of Liberia by justifying colonization and repatriation as God's providential plan. This paper will expound on this thinking to unpack white imagination in the construction of Americo-Liberian and indigenous identities.

Paper long abstract:

In 2018, Princeton Theological Seminary became the first theological institution in American history to release a historical audit detailing the institution’s ties to slavery in America. As part of its findings, the report revealed that the seminary in conjunction with Princeton University (then College of New Jersey) played a significant role in the establishment of the American Colonization Society and the founding of Liberia. Through the efforts of faculty, trustee board members, students and alumni, the seminary developed the ideological premise, and created, and funded the structural mechanism for repatriating blacks in America back to Africa.

As part of my ongoing dissertation research and using new primary archival sources, this paper attempts to argue that chief among the Seminary’s ideological contributions was the justification of colonization and repatriation as part of the providential plan of God. This providential thinking would shape the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of common and ranked Americans, white and black, leading to leading to the founding of Africa’s first independent republic. With a focus on Archibald Alexander, James Adair Lyon and Cortlandt Van Rensselaer, this paper will expound on the providential thinking that led to the repatriation of free blacks. It will unpack white imagination in the construction of Americo-Liberian identity vis-à-vis indigenous Liberians in the early 1800s. It will also explore the making of Liberia's religious and political identities in the process.

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Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this work is to investigate the rhetoric and concepts of Alexander Crummell in the construction of the Liberian state and the representations of the agents and individuals involved in this process: the Americo-Liberians and the native Africans

Paper long abstract:

Alexander Crummell (1819 – 1898), American black missionary, theologian, and intellectual, devoted nearly two decades to advocating and legitimizing Liberian colonization, particularly from 1853 to 1872. Our proposal is to investigate Crummell's rhetoric and concepts in the construction of the Liberian state and the representations of the agents and individuals involved in this process: the Americo-Liberians and the native Africans. In this sense, we will demonstrate that Crummell understood the Liberian colonial project, firstly, as a plan for the religious redemption of the African continent and the "negro race" after years of misery due to slavery. Furthermore, the author also perceived the project as the most suitable to the institutional and historical characteristics of the United States, as the African peoples in the region were supposedly less resistant to colonization than other parts of Africa. Therefore, this would facilitate colonization by African Americans, who had been shaped in an environment more connected to democratic values than to bellicose or violent principles. Finally, we will show that Crummell employed a racialist vocabulary to understand the Liberian experience and Africans, primarily by accepting that races would have certain characteristics, and the "negro race" would possess a fundamental one for acquiring civilization: the ability to imitate the superior peoples of the world. Our intention, ultimately, is to demonstrate how Crummell's civilizational, religious, and racialist rhetoric, present in his books, articles, and sermons, generated ambiguities and inconsistencies in the representation of blacks in the diaspora and native Africans.

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Paper short abstract:

The concept of "Africannesse" in Liberia encompasses a rich tapestry of traditions, history, and identity, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's presidency has contributed to the ongoing dialogue about what it means to be Liberian, with all its diverse cultural influences.

Paper long abstract:

Liberia and America, linked by very old relations, have never deviated from their common destiny (Franchi, 2022).This imperative was reinforced with the accession of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to the presidency in 2006, as she was above all determined to work for national reconstruction (Security Council, March 2006). Since then, her achievements make her an influential figure in several fields, notably cultural. Therefore, Ellen's contribution to the cultural development of American descendants in Liberia is a subject that reflects the dynamics of identity, heritage and cultural integration.

Her leadership and policies have influenced the cultural landscape, especially her efforts to promote inclusion, unity and national identity. She advocates for the preservation and celebration of Liberia's diverse cultural heritage, particularly that of the American settlers and their descendants. The question then arises as what role did Ellen Johnson Sirleaf play in shaping the cultural narrative of Liberia?

This study is anchored on two axes. The first seeks to shed light on Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's influence in promoting the cultural diversity of Liberia, including that of the descendants of American settlers, while emphasizing on the importance of national unity and common identity (I). The second, on its side, concerns the economic issues of Liberia's diverse cultural heritage, for which Sirleaf's leadership and policies have considerably influenced (II). To verify them, this proposal, in a historical approach, draws on a host of documents, archives and oral sources. The result being, that of the commemoration of the diverse cultural heritage of Liberia.