From one colonial situation to another: politics, universalism and the crisis of the African intellectual

This essay explores circum-Atlantic emigrationism and its relationship to West Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The intellectual politics of this Atlantic traffic serve as a source for engaging Atlantic colonial situations that were created by powers in Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa, particularly the nuances associated with African Atlantic emigration to Africa and Black intellectuals' negotiations of overlapping Atlantic colonial situations. This project contributes to African and African American studies, and it is particularly concerned with deepening understanding of the African Atlantic struggle against racism and, in regards to Liberia, enhancing appreciation of what the historian J.F.A. Ajayi referred to as "the internal development of African communities and of inter-group relations in African history."