Population Projections: Demographic Fearmongering and “Uterine Colonization” during the Age of Gradual Emancipation

Type de ressource
Article de revue
Auteur/contributeur
Titre
Population Projections: Demographic Fearmongering and “Uterine Colonization” during the Age of Gradual Emancipation
Résumé
Centered primarily on the American Colonization Society (ACS), this article explores the movement to colonize free Black women and men in West Africa as a political—as well as a knowledge—project rooted in demography. Hostile to slavery and immediate emancipation alike, white colonizationists used quantitative rhetoric to transform African Americans along a vast spectrum of unfreedom into a “dangerous” and multiplying population in need of removal. While this demographic fearmongering proved effective, the ACS struggled to make large-scale expatriation appear equally so. To render removal “practicable,” colonizationists harnessed the fertility of African American women. By specifically targeting those in their procreative prime for expatriation, colonizationists believed they could gradually deplete the country’s Black population. The colonization project as envisioned by the ACS, then, was the clear inheritor of demography’s hierarchizing tendencies. Not only did colonizationists reproduce the epistemic violence of a system that fragmented and instrumentalized the bodies of Black women, but in specifically targeting the latter for expatriation, they produced a new category via which to define African Americans as a threatening and unassimilable population.
Publication
Journal for the History of Knowledge
Date
2025-09-19
Volume
6
Pages
189-207
Consulté le
16/02/2026 13:48
ISSN
2632-282X
Titre abrégé
Population Projections
Langue
en
Catalogue de bibl.
Licence
Copyright (c) 2025 Meagan Wierda
Référence
Wierda, Meagan. « Population Projections: Demographic Fearmongering and “Uterine Colonization” during the Age of Gradual Emancipation ». Journal for the History of Knowledge 6 (19 septembre 2025) : 189‑207. https://doi.org/10.55283/jhk.19138.
Années
Corps professoral