Black Agrarian Futures, Emigration, and Global Abolitionism

Marina Bilbija’s “Black Agrarian Futures, Emigration, and Global Abolitionism” picks up on Finley’s discussion of the agrarian frameworks of African American emigration programs of the 1850s, focusing specifically on... [ view full abstract ]

Marina Bilbija’s “Black Agrarian Futures, Emigration, and Global Abolitionism” picks up on Finley’s discussion of the agrarian frameworks of African American emigration programs of the 1850s, focusing specifically on Martin Delany and Robert C. Campbell’s unsuccessful Niger Valley emigration campaign. Through readings of Campbell’s writings on West Indian Emancipation, the Niger Valley campaign, and his Lagos Anglo-African editorials, she assembles a contradictory account of what counted as a propitious “climate” for free black life. For example, even as the Niger Valley expedition reports extolled the wealth of agricultural possibilities and climate conditions for new settlers, they also remark on the existence of slave-holding, agrarian communities surrounding the future settlement. Bilbija argues that Campbell, the only person associated with the emigration campaign to actually relocate to Lagos, addressed this contiguity of free black communities with unfree ones indirectly by repurposing pro-Union and abolitionist US material as both cosmopolitan content- foreign news directed to Anglophone creole readers and “universal” items that could speak to local conditions of unfreedom.