“All Those Things Desirable for a Map to Show”

Abstract

Chapter 2 examines the geographic and spatial logic that undergirded colonization. By occupying the “civilizing” space of Liberia, degraded American blackness was transformed into exotic, and “civilized,” whiteness. One of the keys to this transformation was to project Liberia as a tiny United States in which Americo-Liberians served as masters of their own “civilized” space. Critical to the perception of “civilized” white settlers and degraded black Africans was the requirement that “heathen” Africans be separate and beyond the limits of “civilization,” so as to not taint the space with their barbarity, while simultaneously projecting control over the black bodies of the African inhabitants. Cartography and maps of Liberia proved useful tools in this complex dance of establishing separation and togetherness, distance and control, simultaneously.