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“To Enter Africa from America”: The United States, Africa, and the New Imperialism, 1862−1919 is a collaborative digital project that seeks to reveal little known patterns of American movement across Africa in the context of broader American ideas about the continent that emerged during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Specifically, TEAA places those actions in dialogue with the “African Question,” which was a body of political discourses that emerged during the mid-nineteenth century that sought to articulate the meaning and relevance of Africa in an increasingly Eurocentric interconnected world. This encompassed political thought that focused primarily on the relationship between Africa and Europe, but held implications for broader formulations of empire, race, and national identities. TEAA analyzes this relationship by engaging in close reading of selected printed and archival primary sources (which constitute the corpus) and through a network analysis of those documents designed to expose explicit social, diplomatic, political, cultural, and literary relationships within them. TEAA explores the formation of these connections through American diplomatic, social, religious, and leisure activities in Africa. In short, TEAA collaborators closely read texts and images, identify their rhetorical features, historical context, and cultural references, and analyze them to draw conclusions about their meaning.

Presented by the Digital Humanities Research Workshop