My third book, The Letter of the Law in J.E. Casely Hayford’s West Africa, will soon be available from Princeton University Press. As the first book devoted to the career of anglophone West Africa’s most important early twentieth-century statesman and intellectual, it offers a broadly revisionist account of liberal anticolonial thought. The book maps the contours of Casely Hayford’s thought through sustained attention to his written work within its Gold Coast and British imperial contexts, demonstrating the far-reaching conceptual and aesthetic resources of his elite legal background.

Treating Casely Hayford’s 1911 novel, Ethiopia Unbound, as a constitutional document and his legal writings as literary exemplars, The Letter of the Law breaks down artificial divisions between African textual traditions. It argues that law, for Casely Hayford and his Fante nationalist peers, was intimately bound to the virtues they attached to textuality: clear-headedness, moderation, restraint, and public discernment. The book argues for this liberal disposition as a crucial and neglected part of anticolonial intellectual and political history. Colonial-era legal debates framed the rise of an influential, consummately modern Gold Coast leader deemed fit to steer ambitious new pan-African institutions, and, in its telling, Casely Hayford emerges as his era’s most emblematic figure.

Selected Reviews:

“Jackson’s arguments are compelling, her prose neatly combines clarity of expression with complexity of ideas, and her research is meticulous. Her Casely Hayford emerges as character: simultaneously a literary character and a person of great character.”—Peter Kalliney, University of Kentucky

“This is a tour de force—erudite, bold, and original. Jackson models the complexity of her subject with a sophisticated handling that refuses to cast Casely Hayford in a simple light. The book is a generational accomplishment.”—Cajetan Iheka, Yale University