Jeannette Eileen Jones

“America in Africa” examines US-African affairs from the colonization of Liberia to the end of World War I, demonstrating the shift from a US focus on the slavery question—the abolition of slavery and the suppression of transatlantic slave trade—to the African question: a set of political discourses about the place of Africa in the world from Western perspectives. The book argues that this transformation links inextricably to the histories of US empire, racial ideologies including the proverbial Negro question, which in its various permutations framed African Americans as a problem in US society and the body politic, and inter-imperial relations. Attending to the interplay between statecraft and racecraft, the book explores how the US’s desires to assert itself on the international stage diplomatically, economically, and culturally drove US interests in Africa.