Dalila Scruggs

My dissertation investigates the visual imaging practices of the American Colonization Society (ACS). The American Colonization Society was comprised of a motley group of statesmen, gradual abolitionists, and slave owners who advocated “colonization,” sending blacks out of the country. The Society was founded in 1816 to establish colonies in Liberia, West Africa for free and manumitted African-Americans. Along with literary “sketches,” correspondence, and financial records, the Society used paintings, photographs, and engravings to demonstrate the efficacy of their work and garner support for their mission. African-Americans also participated in this image campaign as sitters in portraits and as picture makers. I will explore how both the white-run ACS and AfricanAmerican settlers in Liberia used visual imagery to represent Liberian settler identity to a public faced with resolving the “problem” of race in antebellum America.

I will use the SAAM fellowship to research two areas of colonization images: portraits of African-American settlers in Liberia and landscape representations of the Liberian settlement. I plan to explore the social and aesthetic discourses that inform colonization images by contextualizing ACS pictures housed at the Library of Congress with ACS records and nineteenth-century American artworks with similar thematic and formal content in Smithsonian collections.

Although this project is focused geographically on West Africa, thematically it is very much an American art history project. Colonization imagery was intended to sway American public opinion and drew its meaning from social and aesthetic discourses circulating in the United States. With its transatlantic scope, a project on colonization imagery dovetails with SAAM’s interest in American art in international contexts.