Transforming the African Missionary Narrative: Rhetorical Innovation in Martin Delany's Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party

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.