Lecture: Jeanne-Marie Jackson

Dr. Jeanne-Marie Jackson (Johns Hopkins University) will deliver a talk on her latest book, The Letter of the Law in J. E. Casely Hayford's West Africa (Princeton UP, 2026). Dr. Jackson is visiting as a Willson Center Distinguished Lecturer and as a speaker in the UGA African Studies Institute Speaker Series.

The African Gold Coast writer and statesman J. E. Casely Hayford (1866–1930) was a key figure in liberal anticolonial thought as well as African and British imperial literary and intellectual history. In this revisionist account, Jeanne-Marie Jackson positions his career as an intriguing case study of anticolonial literature and politics. Jackson 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, Jackson breaks down artificial divisions between African textual traditions. The 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. Jackson 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 Jackson’s telling, Casely Hayford emerges as his era’s most emblematic figure.

Jeanne-Marie Jackson is Professor of English at Johns Jopkins University, where she is also a Class of 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and Director of Hopkins' Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. Jackson is the author of three books that situate broad questions of comparative method, literature and philosophy, liberal thought, and interpretive scale in the context of African literature and intellectual history. Most recently, The Letter of the Law in J.E. Casely Hayford's West Africa (Princeton 2026) offers a concept-driven account of how law buttressed a new kind of textual disposition among early-twentieth-century Gold Coast state-builders. The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing (Princeton 2021), which was awarded Honorable Mention for the African Literature Association's Book of the Year Prize, reads African fiction in tandem with African philosophy to showcase the novel form's negotiation between liberal selfhood and liberationist ideals. And South African Literature's Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation (Bloomsbury 2015) casts Russia's nineteenth-century Golden Age of literature and ideas as a model for the study of later South African realist forms and epistemologies, also arguing for perceived disconnection as a source of transnational affinity. Jackson is currently at work on a short, co-authored book with Tsitsi Jaji for the new "Literature and Politics" series at Oxford University Press, as well as a long-term project that reads changing moral vocabularies through the history of gold and diamond mining in Ghana and South Africa. She is also co-editor, with Adwoa Opoku-Agyemang, of the first critical edition of Casely Hayford’s 1911 novel Ethiopia Unbound (MSUP 2024), and, with Cajetan Iheka, the volume Intellectual Traditions of African Literature 1960-2015 (Cambridge UP 2025). Her scholarly work is published or forthcoming in a wide range of academic journals and edited collections, as well as public-facing venues including the New York Times; the New Left Review (Sidecar), Public Books, 3:AM Magazine, n+1, Africa Is a Country, The Conversation, Popula, the Chronicle Review, and The Hopkins Review. Links to this writing, as well as to selected interviews and conversations, can be found at jeannemariejackson.com.