Liberia as American Diaspora: The Transnational Scope of American Identity in the Mid-nineteenth Century

The issue of nineteenth-century African-American exploration in Africa raises a number of questions: can we compare the discursive patterns of these black American narratives of exploration to contemporaneous nineteenth-century white chronicles of the American west? What can narrative patterns tell us about the ways in which Americans, both black and white, perceived themselves and others in the various landscapes they gradually came to occupy? Are there ways in which the nineteenth-century chronicles of African Americans Benjamin Anderson, James Sims, and George Seymour in Liberia can shed light on the turbulent state of affairs in Liberia and other parts of Africa both then and now?