Assistant Professor of History and African & African American Studies at the University of Arkansas
About
Dr. Banton is an assistant professor of Afro-Caribbean history at the University of Arkansas who is jointly appointed in history and African and African American Studies. She received an MA in development studies from the University of Ghana in July 2012 and completed her doctoral work at Vanderbilt University in June 2013. Her research focuses on movements around abolition, emancipation, and colonization, as well as ideas of citizenship, blackness, and nationhood in the 19th century. Her research has been supported by a number of fellowships, including the Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship that allowed her to do research in West Africa, the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Robert Penn Warren Center where she joined a group of scholars across a wide range of academic disciplines in the Sawyer Seminar — "The Age of Emancipation: Black Freedom in the Atlantic World" — to study abolition, anti-slavery, and emancipation for the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Lapidus Center Fellowship at the Schomburg Center. At the University of Arkansas, Dr. Banton teaches classes in Afro-Caribbean history, African Diaspora history, and race. She is currently working on her book manuscript, currently under contract with Cambridge University Press, Barbadian Migration to Liberia: Blackness and the Making of the African Republic, 1865-1912; a study that explores continuities and mutabilities in black experiences of freedom, citizenship, and nationhood across the Atlantic world.
Current Work:
Dr. Banton's book in progress, Barbadian Migration to Liberia, explores West Indian emigration to Liberia. It explores why 346 Barbadians decided to migrate to Liberia and the political and socio-cultural outcomes of their settlement, particularly the pressure it exerted on the meanings of blackness in the Atlantic world. She argues that under the British Empire in the Caribbean, Barbadians navigated an inherited tension between ideas of blackness and tenets of modernity. Acting as agents of African civilization and inhabiting an English imperial identity secured the Barbadians privileges in the republic's hierarchy above other blacks upon arrival in Liberia. Thus, despite their migratory protest of imperial racial subjugation, Barbadians remained entangled in the patented realities of white supremacy in Liberia, which by fracturing assumptions of Black homogeneity made a more complex picture of the Black identity visible.
Research Area Keyword(s):
Race, Blackness, Caribbean, African Diaspora, migration, African Republic
