Join the Department of Political Science and the Department of History's co-sponsored Speaker Series with guest speaker, Professor Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey from McGill University.
Abstract
"In the early 1900s, white mobs attacked African Americans throughout the United States, lynching and terrorizing hundreds per year. Without citizenship rights, even after shouldering arms for the Allies in World War One, black people in the United States and Canada yearned for a leader—a deliverer of sorts—who would redeem the “race,” helping ordinary folk receive full citizenship. In their yearnings, the black masses, and some leaders, too, embraced a mystical and messianic form of pan-Africanism. This presentation will explore the dimensions of this racial awakening in North America from 1919 to 1931."
About the speaker
Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey researches and teaches post-Reconstruction U.S. history, specializing on the African American experience and African Diaspora in Canada and the Caribbean. Before joining the faculty at McGill University, Adjetey held the W. L. Mackenzie King Fellowship at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Department of History Lectureship. Adjetey’s first monograph—Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America, 1919-1992—is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. His research has garnered prizes and fellowships from many sources: SSHRC, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, University of Pennsylvania, Yale, and Princeton, to name a few. In 2017-18, he was Visiting Scholar and Pre-Doctoral Fellow at MIT, and in 2016-17, Visiting Scholar and Senior Resident Fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto. Adjetey earned the M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Yale University.