Pan-African History Comes Alive in Wendell Adjetey’s Powerful New Book

The launch of Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America by Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey drew a captivated audience on Thursday, July 17^th, 2025, at the Blackhurst Cultural Centre in Toronto.

Adjetey, who also goes by Nii Laryea Osabu I, Oblantai Mantse of Atrekor, is an Assistant Professor of post-Reconstruction U.S. and African Diaspora history at McGill University in Montreal, where he holds the William Dawson Chair. His delivery (rooted in lived history and sharp insight) held the audience’s attention from start to finish.

Although the University of North Carolina Press published the book in 2023, its Toronto launch felt especially fitting. In this multicultural city, home to vibrant African, Black, and Caribbean communities, Adjetey’s thesis resonated: immigrants’ experiences extend beyond economic survival. They lead to activism, advocacy, solidarity, and enduring networks.

During the question-and-answer session, attendees explored the book’s central themes—how communities across the Canadian-U.S. border fought systemic racism while confronting the intertwined forces of colonialism, exploitation, marginalization, and capitalism. These struggles, Adjetey emphasized, are rooted in historical realities that still shape the immigrant experience.

Cross-Border Cosmopolitans unfolds in two parts, divided into six chapters:

Part One

1. The Messianic Movements, 1919–1931
2. Borderland Blues, 1930–1950
3. Civil Rights or Human Rights? 1950–1966

Part Two

4. Immigration, Black Power, and Draft Resisters
5. The Mind of the State
6. Cold Wars, Hot Wars

From messianic movements to draft resisters, Adjetey traces the birth of “borderless communities” that predate globalization. The “race-first” model, he explains, was central to liberation movements. Despite infiltration and counterintelligence operations aimed at halting Black liberation, the fight endured. “Like in previous centuries, a race-conscious global Black cosmos remains incompatible with imperialism and neocolonialism,” Adjetey stated. “So long as these geopolitical forces continue to subjugate the Black masses and disembody the African continent, Pan-Africanisms will live. The past offers many lessons for those who continue to dream and organize.”

The book has drawn praise from leading scholars:

• Joy William Trotter Jr., author of Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America, calls it “A stellar work of global diasporic Black history that tells a new story about how American-born people of African descent, as well as Caribbean Black immigrants, forged both a Pan-African movement and a Pan-African community in English North America along the Canadian-U.S. border.”
• Russel Rickford, author of We Are an African People, describes it as “A fascinating and original examination of the transnational orientation and border-crossing practices of African North Americans in the long twentieth century.”
• Michael Gomez of New York University says, “An impressive study of Pan-Africanism and the Black Power movement in twentieth-century North America… a signal achievement, as welcome as it is sorely needed.”
• Toyin Falola of the University of Texas at Austin adds, “This powerful book pays a deserving homage to the architects and transnational actors in the imagination and pursuit of a collective Black world… revealing with clarity and eloquence the depth of activism and the seriousness of struggles to confront domination, exploitation, and colonization.”

Cross-Border Cosmopolitans is available through Indigo-Chapters, Amazon.ca, Oxford University Press, and University of Toronto Press.