How the Old South Confronted the Dilemma of David Livingstone (original) (raw)
Note: this is a shortened version of a much longer piece, and I haven't straightened out the notes from the long essay to the conference paper. Chill out, in other words. David Livingstone was the greatest African explorer of the middle-nineteenth century -- a missionary, a humanitarian, a visionary for the integration of Africa into western civilization. He was an international hero. He was also an abolitionist. How did white southerners deal with that? I will be presenting this essay to the Southern Historical Association as part of the panel "What Does Africa Mean to Me? Africa and Antebellum African-American Identity" at 9:30 am, Friday, November 14 (session #3). http://sha.uga.edu/2014%20Program%20for%20Web.pdf
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The Old South Confronts the Dilemma of David Livingstone
Journal of Southern History 82:4 (November 2016), 789-822. David Livingstone posed a real problem for white southerners before the Civil War: he was an international hero, but also an abolitionist. Like other antislavery celebrities, such as Charles Dickens, the South could not simply pretend he did not exist. So they took up a number of strategies to recognize him without acknowledging his hostility to slavery, including shameless appropriation (claiming he vindicated reopening the slave trade), and, chiefly, selective accommodation. Southerners simply ignored, worked around, or winked at Livingstone's antislavery message. They were forced into these often shameless intellectual acrobatics because rejecting Livingstone was tantamount to rejecting western civilization, which white southerners were unwilling to do. The lesson here is that the white South did not reject modernity -- modernity was rejecting it. And white southerners blinked first.
Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2017
One major problem confronting the definition of Comparative Literature is that of the involvement (on the one hand) of more than one literature under comparison and (on the other hand) that of the consideration of the multidimensional aspects of such literature, such as social, historical, linguistic, religious, economic and cultural aspects of divergent societies. This study is guided by the above factors in analyzing the concept of Racial Discrimination in Southern Africa and African American literatures in the sense that the former’s experiences were on African soil, while the latter’s were on the NewFound land (America). The paper observes that racial discrimination was much severe and oppressive without much resistance in America than in Southern Africa where Africans withstood and fought back against an unjust, wicked and oppressive system.
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