Cross-Border Cosmopolitans - by Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey

About the Book

"Twentieth-century African American history cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of U.S. policy from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, by contending that twentieth-century global Black liberation movements began within the U.S.-Canadian borderlands as cross-border, continental struggles, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans reveals the revolutionary legacies of the Underground Railroad and America's Great Migration and the hemispheric and transatlantic dimensions of this history"--

Book Synopsis

African American history from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American mainland, particularly Canada following U.S. authorities' deportation of Garvey to Jamaica, as a forward-operating base from which to liberate the Black masses from colonialism. After World War II, Vietnam War resisters, Black Panthers, and Caribbean students joined the throngs of cross-border migrants to denounce militarism, imperialism, and capitalism. In time, as urban uprisings proliferated in northern U.S. cities, the prospect of coalitions among the Black Power, Red Power, and Quebecois Power movements inspired U.S. and Canadian intelligence services to collaborate, infiltrate, and sabotage Black organizations across North America. Assassinations of "Black messiahs" further radicalized revolutionaries, rekindling the dream for an African World from Washington, D.C., to Toronto to San Francisco to Antigua to Grenada and back to Africa. Alarmed, Washington's national security elites invoked the Cold War as the reason to counter the triangulation of Black Power in the Atlantic World, funneling arms clandestinely from the United States and Canada to the Caribbean and then to its proxies in southern Africa.

By contending that twentieth-century global Black liberation movements began within the U.S.-Canadian borderlands as cross-border, continental struggles, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans reveals the revolutionary legacies of the Underground Railroad and America's Great Migration and the hemispheric and transatlantic dimensions of this history.

Review Quotes

"A significant work of recovery. . . . Adjetey has made an important contribution to our understanding of the struggle against anti-Black racism in North America in the twentieth century."--New West Indian Guide

"Cross-Border Cosmopolitans is well-researched and makes tremendous contributions to the study of Black Atlantic and diasporic African history by decentering and not rendering the African American experience as the diasporic African experience."--American Historical Review

""This book makes important contributions to several historiographies with its innovative approach to understanding the development of global movements for Black freedom using sources that span a full century and cross and recross national borders."--Journal of American History

"A substantial contribution to the growing historiographic body on Black Internationalism, transnational Black activism, and Black Power movements in the twentieth century. . . . [Adjetey] employs the biographies of remarkable activists to paint a complex panorama of twentieth-century Pan-Africanisms and is an important addition to African Diasporic, Atlantic, and transnational histories."--Western Historical Quarterly

"Adjetey has made an important contribution to the field of diaspora studies, one that will force scholars to rethink the geography of Black internationalism in North America for years to come. Furthermore, the political geographies and relationships recounted in this impressively crafted book make clear how activists practically challenged racism and imperialism on different scales--locally, nationally, and globally. . . . A remarkable scholarly achievement.""--H-Caribbean

"An important book . . . Timely and essential given the narrow and almost ubiquitous emphasis on black victimization in contemporary public discourses. The book's perspective . . . positions itself as a valuable methodological option for crafting and telling the history of diasporic Blacks in different parts of the world, and for approaching the study of civil rights, independence, and revolutionary movements."--Ethnic and Racial Studies

"Sophisticated, ambitious, and compellingly argued . . . Cross-Border Cosmopolitans shows the many ways in which Black people across the Canada-US borderlands developed communities, pursued international interests, and fought for opportunity that transcended national borders. The book amounts to an expansive reconceptualization of Black Power across the broad swath of a continent."--CHOICE

About the Author

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey is associate professor of post-Reconstruction U.S. and African Diaspora history at McGill University, where he holds the William Dawson Chair. He also goes by Nii Laryea Osabu I, Atrékor Wé Oblahii kè Oblayéé Mantsè.