In Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America, Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey explores North America’s long history of Pan-Africanist movements and ideas. Because these movements connected local experiences of marginalization with expansive and transnational visions of justice, they do not fit easily into the national frameworks that continue to dominate the writing of history. At the beginning of the book, Adjetey therefore lays out his methodological challenge: “How do we explain a people whose migrations, labor, family ties, social aspirations, politics, and revolutionary struggle transcended the boundaries of empires and states?” (2). How, in other words, do we make sense of complex cross-border lives and imaginations? The rest of the book is an answer to this question. Through a series of deeply researched micro studies, Adjetey draws vivid portraits of often forgotten figures, highlighting how their ideas were developed through life trajectories that involved moving across national boundaries and constantly adapting and changing in response to local circumstances. Drawing on archival papers, interviews, press reports, intelligence documents, and other sources, Adjetey crafts his study around the complicated lives of activists, positioning them as intellectuals who worked tirelessly to craft “alternative notions of citizenship” (2). By starting from the experiences of historically situated individuals and their political and intellectual lives, Adjetey argues that “twentieth-century Pan-Africanisms in North America organically synchronized phenomena that scholars call social and cultural history (or history from below) and political and intellectual history (or history from above)” (6). To me, these efforts of taking the ideas of activists seriously and charting their role in processes of social transformation is one of the most important contributions of the book. In addition to outlining Pan-African sensibilities, he also shows the collusion of the Canadian and American states to destroy these movements. Certainly, one of the most chilling aspects of the book is its discussion of the counter-subversion dimensions of the Canadian and American states and how they converged in the figure of Warren Hart. The reader follows Hart, an FBI agent in the Baltimore Black Panthers, to his infiltration of Black radical activists in Canada. In 1970s Toronto, Hart, working for the RCMP, intentionally provided weapons to Black youth and worked to break up a budding alliance of anti-colonial movements. As Adjetey explains, “Crisis manufacturing was central to counter-subversion” (215). The use of Hart to disrupt local movements became just one part of a larger counter-subversion effort, one that also played out in southern Africa and the Caribbean. Part of what makes Adjetey’s work so powerful is its wide scope and extended time frame, but this wide scope necessarily means that the book leaves many stones unturned. He states at the beginning that “a book on a subject as geographically expansive, personality driven, temporally varied, and conceptually dynamic as Pan-Africanisms can be only a portion, not the totality, of enumerable threads” (15). To take one example of an underexplored thread, Adjetey brings Haiti into the story at the beginning of the study, arguing that “Haitians and Haiti have earned a renowned place in the diasporic African imagination” (12). Yet the role of the Haitian diaspora and its cross-border connections between Canada and the United States fades from view as the book moves further into the twentieth century. Throughout the book there are also significant hints of another major story that could one day be written in close dialogue with Adjetey’s work: how the cross-border imaginaries of Indigenous activists intersected with the Pan-Africanist visions outlined in Cross-Border Cosmopolitans. Adjetey highlights Rosie Douglas’s “exposure to the plight of Indigenous peoples” while in jail (221), and we see …
