Transforming the African Missionary Narrative: Rhetorical Innovation in Martin Delany's Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party
Affiliation:
1. San Diego State University
Abstract
ABSTRACT
This rhetorical analysis investigates Martin Delany's (1861) innovative yet understudied Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party as a significant instance of nineteenth-century African American generic transformation and constitutive pan-Africanism. I explore how Delany recasts the genre of the mid-nineteenth-century African missionary narrative—with its white supremacist standpoint—into a lean, tightly controlled secular report intended to establish (1) Delany's African American readers’ agency as potential African emigrants; (2) the value of Delany's leadership in the emigration movement; and (3) a powerful constitutive pan-African ideological foundation for the emigration movement and for black uplift more generally.
Publisher
The Pennsylvania State University Press
Subject
Literature and Literary Theory,Linguistics and Language,Communication,Language and Linguistics
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