Interracial Coalitions, Repressive Responses: Black & Red Power in N.Amer.

On Sunday, June 11, at 6pm, join Massy Arts and UNC Press at Interracial Coalitions, Repressive Responses: Black and Red Power in North America with Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Nii Laryea Osabu I, Oblantai Mantsè, Atrékor Wé) and host Jessica Wang.

Join us in examining forms of counterinsurgency and deliberate federal policies in the United States and Canada to sabotage inter-racial coalitions and goodwill between Black Power and Red Power movements.

Registration is free/by donation, open to all and required for entrance.

Venue & Accessibility

The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.

The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site. Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.

For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility

Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.

About the book:

Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (UNC Press)

African American history from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Black activists perceived North America as a forward-operating base to liberate the global Black masses from colonialism. After World War II, Vietnam War resisters, Black Panthers, and Caribbean students joined the throngs of cross-border migrants to denounce militarism, imperialism, and capitalism. As urban uprisings spread in northern U.S. cities, the prospect of coalitions among the Black Power, Red Power, and Quebecois Power movements inspired U.S. and Canadian intelligence services to collaborate, infiltrate, and sabotage Black organizations. Assassinations of "Black messiahs" further radicalized revolutionaries, rekindling the dream for an African World from Washington, D.C., to Toronto to San Francisco to Antigua to Grenada and back to Africa. Alarmed, Washington's national security elites invoked the Cold War as the reason to counter the triangulation of Black Power in the Atlantic World, funneling arms secretly from Canada and the United States to the Caribbean and then to its proxies in southern Africa.

Author:

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Nii Laryea Osabu I, Oblantai Mantsè, Atrékor Wé) is an award-winning historian, humanitarian, and social entrepreneur whose scholarship and commitment to social change bridge North America, Africa, and the wider African Diaspora. At McGill University, he is William Dawson Chair, Assistant Professor, and specialist in post-Reconstruction U.S. and African Diaspora history. Dr. Adjetey is author of Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (UNC Press). He is working on two book projects: One on nineteenth-century African warfare along the Gulf of Guinea Coast; the other on revolutionary Black politics in the United States. Before pursuing an academic career, he spent several years working in youth gang prevention and intervention in north Toronto. Dr. Adjetey earned the Ph.D., M.A., and M.Phil. from Yale University. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Toronto (University of St. Michael's College).

Host:

Jessica Wang is a professor at the University of British Columbia, where she holds a joint appointment in the Department of Geography and the Department of History. She has published on a wide range of topics related to the history of science and medicine in the United States, including her most recent book, Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840-1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). Her current research focuses on agriculture, international relations, and U.S. imperial power in the early twentieth century.

Host or Publisher Massy Arts Society