Perhaps the most significant contribution of Wendell Adjetey’s pathbreaking study Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America is the space it has created for a new generation of Canadian historians to find their voices in a redefined arena that does not live in the shadow of the African American experience. Adjetey accomplishes this, in part, by enlarging the scope of scholarship on the African diaspora by viewing it through a geographic lens. He brings the Great Lakes region into focus as an understudied site of Black agency in the twentieth century that complicates traditional understandings of nationality. While much writing about international Black connections has centred on the crossing of oceans and rivers and the historical meaning of bodies of water for the African diaspora, this seminal study by Wendell Adjetey is focused on land. He presents a remapping, a moral geography that centres the industrial Great Lakes as an area of cultural vitality and historical significance. Examining Black insurgency this way can lead to new insights about communities of African origin. Studies of the Black Atlantic and Pacific have leaned heavily on previous centuries. Adjetey’s work, in contrast, gestures toward the conditions of late capitalism. What can we learn if we view centres of production geographically? “The geopolitical map of states remains the primary model of space,” writes Michael J. Shapiro. That map of states betrays little of, Shapiro continues, “the alternative worlds destroyed and suppressed within modern cartography. Despite increasingly active competitors for identity and affiliation, this model still dominates how things are valued, actions are interpreted, and persons are assigned identities.… The alternative worlds destroyed and suppressed within modern cartography become available only when the global map is given historical depth.” The moral geography of continental unrest emerges in the context of synchronous revolt in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. This suggests the possibilities inherent in looking at a North American, rather than a nationally specific, Black freedom struggle. This is where Foucault’s “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” can lead to new understandings of the African diaspora. The civil rights and Black Power movements provoked sensibilities and practices that activists could interpret to alter conditions in their own countries, and while US discourses are widely adopted as authoritative, their weight is displaced when they are charted onto a narrative of continuous global exchange within the Americas, textured by the histories of slavery, migration, cultural exchange, and imperialism. North American Black cosmopolitanism had a counterpart in the international cooperation between Canadian and US authorities. In 1967, the same year that residents of Windsor, Ontario, watched the southern sky redden with flames from Detroit’s insurrection, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched the Key Sectors program to improve its ability to investigate persons and groups deemed subversive. Those now included Caribbeans, Indigenous radicals, and student protesters. As Adjetey reveals in depth, the coordination between Canadian and American dissidents that his writing applauds worried intelligence agents who attended Canadian university events and monitored disaffected students, taking care to probe any ties they discovered among militant groups. Ironically, Canada’s efforts to insulate itself from the turbulent South drew it ever more closely into networks of surveillance and suppression, as its agents operated inside the United States as well as at home. Adjetey notes that Canada’s unique position within the British Commonwealth gave it a leg up in its wish to “counter the growing U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere while strengthening its commercial ties”. Yet this affective union was not to be. Adjetey agrees with Robin Winks in concluding that it “floundered upon the rock of race” (156). Free, unencumbered …
