Security, Exile, Population: Colonization from David Walker to the Liberia Herald

Abstract By looking at colonization at white responses to Black population increase in the US, this essay argues that exile and other biopolitical mechanisms undo the logic of security by showing how the search for safety itself generates and amplifies insecurity. Framed against contemporary meditations on exile, the essay examines how whites presented the deportation of US Blacks to Liberia as a solution to a national security crisis. In response, Black activists and writers such as James Forten and Russell Parrott demonstrated how white concerns created insecurity among the US Black population. To offset the vulnerability of exile that other colonizationists mandated for Black people, the use of racial arithmetic in Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper, and by David Walker shows that security for Blacks can be achieved, at least rhetorically, by mobilizing biopower and exploiting arithmetical ratios of Blacks to whites. In a twist, however, the editor of Freedom’s Journal, John Russwurm, emigrated to West Africa to publish the Liberia Herald whose columns reveal how in the exile’s safe haven racial differences upheld by the US continued to have meaning. In exile, security and insecurity remained twined about each other in cycles of violence. Extermination is population security at its most absolute. . . . if the problem of security is the population’s ceaseless potential for being born, reproducing, and dying, then, exile and colonization serve as technologies for radically altering the polity in the name of national interest.