ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the continuities between transatlantic slavery, its attendant racial logics, and their relation to the role ethnicity played in the Liberian civil war. The transatlantic slave economy and “post-colonial armed rebel movements in Africa” have conventionally been regarded as distinct phenomena. The eclectic corpus of literature that theorizes the root causes of Liberia’s protracted civil conflict cites economic inequality, ethnic tensions, and political exclusion, yet falters in its failure to heed to the ways in which such grievances are thematized by the anti-black workings of ethnicity. Transatlantic repatriation was outwardly configured by abolitionists and their pro-slavery contemporaries, alike, as a fugitive project, an opportunity for “free” blacks to experiment with emancipation and take refuge from the sociopolitical and economic conditions which amounted to what was effectively slavery by another name. The incarnation of politicized ethnicity in nineteenth-century Liberia signified the composition of a new kind of vernacular to elaborate perceived cultural distinctions.
