Telling Blackness Through Liberia

Abstract Chapter 1 “Telling Blackness Through Liberia” lays the theoretical foundation, and clears the disciplinary space, for studying Blackness and Black Diaspora through young Liberians and their peers. In particular, it takes up diaspora theory from several Black scholars from Africa, North America, the Caribbean, and Europe to spatially, temporally, and conceptually situate Liberia in a breathing Black Diaspora. This formulation of Diaspora seriously considers the political and economic dimensions of racialization on a global scale and allows us to map connections between racializing structural processes and racial identification processes across spacetimes. To that end, the chapter grapples with varied meanings of Blackness about and for people from different parts of the world. And, accompanied by a brief overview of African migration that centers movement between Liberia’s capital city and the United States’ “City of Brotherly Love,” it offers a condensed critical geography of Monrovia and Philadelphia, as storied places in Black Diaspora.