Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Nii Laryea Osabu I, Atrékor Wé Nòyaa Mantsè) is a William Dawson Associate Professor of U.S. and African Diaspora history at McGill University.
Mass incarceration symbolizes post-slavery gendered warfare on Black populations. Despite narratives of the rule of law, progress, and social inclusion within the liberal state after World War II, Black people, specifically boys and young men, became the primary targets of unfreedom or social death in North America.
Adjetey’s research project will examine how ostensible democracies in the Americas neutralized anti-colonial movements from the 1870s to the 1990s. Focusing on the legacies of chattel slavery, specifically the disavowal of Black citizenship and frequent state and paramilitary violence, this research posits that the intractable, twin phenomena of hyper criminalization and mass incarceration of Black males are a direct outcome of Black people’s agitation for self-determination and collective resistance to state domination.
Informed by historical and interdisciplinary methods, his scholarship illustrates the myriad and covert ways that settler-colonial societies, under democracy and patriarchy, “quarantine” out-group males from the broader civilian population.
With twenty-years experience contributing to inclusive excellence, civil society and institution building, Adjetey’s boundary-pushing work provides a vocabulary and organizing principle to confront systemic anti-blackness from a more holistic and urgent scholarly vantage point.