Description

This lecture will examine the ways that African peoples in North America imagined and pursued self-determination after World War II. It will illuminate how the U.S. and Canadian governments discredited Black people’s justice claims by using counterinsurgency and counter-revolutionary methods to undermine Black communities in North America (including the Caribbean).  

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Nii Laryea Osabu I, Oblantai Mantsè, Atrékor Wé) is William Dawson Chair, assistant professor, and specialist in post-Reconstruction U.S. history and the history of the African Diaspora in North America and the Atlantic World at McGill University. He is the author of Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (UNC Press). Dr. Adjetey is working on two new book projects. One examines how revolutionary messianism in Black liberation movements in the United States and beyond inspired Western governments to pursue counter-revolutionary, counter-insurgent, and genocidal measures to thwart African-centered self-determination. His other project unearths just war theory, abolitionism, and humanitarianism in the context of nineteenth-century warfare along the Gulf of Guinea Coast.  

Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States.