CAS Lecture Series: On ‘Being Constitutional’: J.E. Casely Hayford and the Facts of the Gold Coast Faith

Jeanne-Marie Jackson is an Associate Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, and a current Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Her most recent book, The African Novel of Ideas (Princeton 2021) reads African novels through the lens of African philosophy to craft a story of how the form has negotiated between liberal selfhood and liberal critique. It ranges from the Fante Coast in the early twentieth century to contemporary South Africa and Zimbabwe, foregrounding work by figures including J.E. Casely Hayford, Stanlake Samkange, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Imraan Coovadia. Her current book project is a literary biography of Casely Hayford, paired with a new teaching edition of his novel Ethiopia Unbound.