| This dissertation seeks to discern and describe the ways the American Colonization Society (ACS) used visual imagery to present the West African country of Liberia to an American public as the ideal solution to the problem of slavery in the United States. The ACS sought to reconcile Revolutionary era values of freedom and equality for all with the belief that America should remain an all-white polity. Colonizationists presented Liberia as the solution to this moral dilemma by portraying it as an American heterotopia, a "separate but equal" place where blacks could live out parallel lives.;Daguerreotypes created by African American daguerreotypist Augustus Washington in Liberia are a focal point of the dissertation, which pays close attention to how the meaning and materiality of the photograph changed as it was produced by African American settlers in Liberia, circulated in a transatlantic context of exchange, appropriated by the American Colonization Society, and disseminated in colonization print culture. What images remained in circulation, or fell from public view, and how they were recontextualized in colonization print culture reveals the ways in which Washington's images were used to constitute the American Colonization Society's vision of Liberia for an American audience.;Moving beyond an isolated study of Washington's Liberian photographs, I place his photographic practice within the American Colonization Society's larger pictorial propaganda program, drawing attention to the array of colonization imagery, generally, and to the presence of other black image makers in Liberia, specifically. African "curiosities," watercolors by African American settler Robert K. Griffin, paintings by John H. B. Latrobe and John Sartain, and other printed ephemera by named and unnamed artists fill out this study of colonization pictures. |
