Negro: Travel and the Pan-African Imagination during the Nineteenth Century.

Abstract

This dissertation is about the role that conservative religious notions of racial ideology played in the historical origins of black nationalism and pan-Africanism. It is a delineation of the origins of black nationalism and pan-Africanism in the black Atlantic world and an examination of the role gender played in the construction of black subjectivity and the pan-African imagination during the nineteenth century. “Negro” is an intervention on the conversation about the role of religious resources in the formation of the black Atlantic intellectual landscape. It is also a critical engagement with African American historiography and the Pan-African movement. This project focuses on the writings of an African Caribbean, Edward Blyden, as the centerpiece of the study. Blyden, a native of Saint Thomas (Virgin Islands) and considered one of the “fathers” of both pan-Africanism and African nationalism, was a particularly complex diasporic intellectual. Traveling first to the United States in the pre-Civil War period, then to Africa and Britain at the height of the European imperial venture – and Christian missionary efforts – Blyden served as a conduit between the West (the United States and Britain) and both a traditional and a Muslim Africa. He saw his role as one of mediating (critiquing/translating) these divergent voices and ideologies with the object of constituting a “modern,” pan-African subject. Clearly gender played a key role in his vision – as it did in the varied voices and ideologies he sought to weave into a new pan-African whole. Blyden’s relation to traditional Christianity and its hierarchical visions of both gender and race was complex and often sorely vexed. Both traditional African concepts of an “authentic” masculinity and Muslim constructions of masculinity intrigued him, and he worked to integrate them into a new vision of a progressive Christian African, one that differed dramatically from visions of masculinity advanced by conventional Christian missionary and colonial administrators. His extensive travels through Africa convinced Blyden that belief systems and modes of conversion often had a deleterious effect on the character and sense of self.