In Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America, Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey offers a significant reinterpretation of twentieth-century Black political life by centring cross-border movement as a defining feature of African diasporic freedom struggles. His meticulously researched study challenges conventional nationalist frameworks and reimagines the Canada–United States border not as a peripheral detail but rather a central mechanism in the racial governance of Black activism. Adjetey brings together histories of Pan-Africanism, transnational labour, religious organizing, and state repression to reveal how Black communities navigated and contested overlapping systems of imperial control. Among the book’s most compelling contributions is its account of surveillance as both a transnational state strategy and a racializing practice; one that shaped not only the possibilities of political mobilization but also the meanings attached to Black presence and movement in North America. This short essay situates Adjetey’s arguments within a longer genealogy of surveillance and racial control, foregrounding how Black transnational activism has historically been criminalized by both the US and Canadian states. Drawing on scholarship by Simone Browne, Keisha Blain, Mary Dudziak, and Erica Edwards, I argue that surveillance regimes were not merely tools of Cold War paranoia or reactive policy but rather structured responses to the enduring challenge posed by Black internationalist politics. These regimes, I suggest, worked to construct Blackness itself as a problem of governance. Adjetey’s contribution lies not only in documenting the state’s repressive capacities but also in recovering the creative and resilient strategies that Black activists employed to subvert them. Although Adjetey focuses primarily on the twentieth century, his analysis is best understood within a longer history of racialized surveillance across the US–Canada border. As scholars such as Afua Cooper and Ruma Chopra have shown, the nineteenth century witnessed the politicization of Black movement during the era of the Underground Railroad. Fugitive slaves who reached Canada faced monitoring by American slave catchers but also suspicion from Canadian officials wary of the political consequences of harbouring fugitives. Protective institutions such as churches, vigilance committees, and mutual aid societies emerged to not only support survival but also resist the implicit criminalization of Black freedom seekers. These early forms of collective defence foreshadowed the cross-border solidarities Adjetey documents in the modern period. Adjetey’s intervention is to demonstrate that surveillance of Black activism became increasingly formalized and collaborative in the twentieth century. He introduces the concept of “serial border crossings and freedom linkages,” part of a larger commitment to a global Black liberation, describing how Black activists mobilized transnationally, while states sought to limit their reach through intelligence sharing and immigration controls (3). From the nineteenth century through the Cold War, governments in the United States and Canada developed tools that crossed national boundaries, tools meant to monitor, disrupt, and neutralize Black activism. This resonates with Simone Browne’s argument that surveillance in North America is historically rooted in the logics of slavery and colonialism. In Dark Matters, Browne contends that from slave patrols to biometric scanning, Blackness has consistently been positioned as “a threat to be managed,” and Black mobility as a site of suspicion and control. In making these connections, she reminds us that racialized surveillance is not just about policing politics; it is also about constructing Blackness as a permanent exception to liberal rights. This helps us read Adjetey’s account of surveillance not as Cold War paranoia alone, but as part of a longer genealogy of how Black mobility, even in search of freedom, has always been criminalized. The Cold War intensified these dynamics. As Black organizations expanded their reach across the border, from churches and fraternal lodges to …
