Dalila L. Scruggs

This dissertation examines art of “colonization,” a movement to send blacks to Africa as a solution to slavery in antebellum America. This project takes an object-oriented approach to colonization imagery by focusing on photographs exchanged between black settlers in Africa and white pro-colonization reformers in America, exploring how this exchange reveals tensions and conflicts between the two groups. This dissertation explores how these black settlers and white reformers each used colonization images to represent Liberian settler identity to an American public faced with resolving the “problem” of race in the United States.