Slavery and the Law Conference Series 2021-2022
October 2021 – The Great Paradox: Chattel Slavery in North America, with Dr. Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey
About the speaker
Dr. Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Nii Laryea Osabu I, Oblantai Mantse Atrekor We) is working on his second and third book projects on warfare and African-led abolitionism on the Gulf of Guinea Coast, and gender and messianic Black revolutionary leadership in the United States, respectively.
Dr. Adjetey’s first monograph is Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (UNC Press, 2023). It situates fundamental questions of twentieth-century U.S. history—immigration, civil rights, racial identity, revolution, counter-revolution, imperialism, and neo-colonialism—within a diasporic North American and transatlantic frame. Cross-Border Cosmopolitans is the result of a major transformation of Dr. Adjetey’s Ph.D. dissertation, which won Yale University’s Edwin M. Small Prize for “outstanding” contribution to U.S. history, Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize for African American Studies, the Canadian Studies Prize, and the Willard “Woody” Brittain, Jr. Award.
