B jørn F. S tillion S outhard . Peculiar Rhetoric

As colonies created by Britain and the United States for formerly enslaved peoples in West Africa, Sierra Leone and Liberia have always had deeply intertwined histories. Two recent books, Bjørn F. Stillion Southard’s Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement and Richard Peter Anderson’s Abolition in Sierra Leone: Re-Building Lives and Identities in Nineteenth-Century West Africa approach these histories from very different angles and make valuable contributions to the scholarship on these subjects, both attesting to the unique role both colonies played in the formation of racial, ethnic, and diasporic identities in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World. As his title suggests, Stillion Southard approaches the African colonization movement in Peculiar Rhetoric not as a historian but rather as a scholar of rhetoric. He notes that scholarly accounts of the movement have tended to highlight the policy failures of its rhetoric as well as the self-consciously “middle” position its advocates...

Archaeology · Colonization · Ethnology · Rhetoric · Sierra leone · Theology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies