I am co-editor, with Cajetan Iheka, of Intellectual Traditions of African Literature, 1960 – 2015, part of the new African Literature in Transition series at Cambridge University Press. This volume provides scholars and students with a birds-eye view of the stories African literature has told about itself. It elaborates on Africa’s contributions to an evolving, transnational literary vocabulary, and though its organization around key terms rather than specific periods or national canons, Intellectual Traditions of African Literature also facilitates movement between and across African traditions: its framework is intrinsically comparative. As befits a project of this scale and versatility, its contributors are drawn from across professional ranks, areas of geographical and subfield expertise, and academies of origin. By contextualizing African literature within a larger set of literary terms and movements, it demonstrates that African literature is intrinsically worldly and transnational, even at points of local historical engagement.

I am also co-editor, with Adwoa Opoku-Agyemang, of the first critical edition of J.E. Casely Hayford’s 1911 novel Ethiopia Unbound. It includes a Foreword by Gus Casely-Hayford, and is available here from Michigan State University Press. Our Introduction and notes shed light on how Casely Hayford drew material from his eminent career as a barrister, statesman, and newspaper editor to augment the book’s fictional elements, showcasing the tremendous intellectual versatility of West Africa. Moving between London and the Gold Coast, as well as across the past, present, and imagined future of Casely Hayford’s Fante civilization, Ethiopia Unbound is an essential record of how Africans at the turn of the twentieth century made sense of their place in a rapidly changing world.

“Jeanne-Marie Jackson and Adwoa A. Opoku-Agyemang have brought back to life a seminal work by one of the founding figures of modern Ghanaian—indeed African—intellectual and political history: J. E. Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound. Their introduction and explanatory notes to the text are priceless. This is a major accomplishment.” —Ato Sekyi-Otu, emeritus professor of social and political thought, York University, author of Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays