This book shines a new light on J. E. Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound, widely considered the first English-language novel published by an African writer. Casely Hayford drew material from his eminent career as a barrister, statesman, and newspaper editor to augment the book’s fictional elements, showcasing the tremendous intellectual versatility of West Africa. Moving between London and the Gold Coast, as well as across the past, present, and imagined future of Casely Hayford’s Fante civilization, Ethiopia Unbound is an essential record of how Africans at the turn of the twentieth century made sense of their place in a rapidly changing world.

Jeanne-Marie Jackson is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, where she works and teaches in the areas of South African, Zimbabwean, Ghanaian, global British, and Russian literary and intellectual traditions. She received her PhD in comparative literature from Yale University in 2012. In 2021 she was named an Andrew Carnegie fellow, and in 2023 she became senior editor of the flagship English literature journal ELH.

Adwoa A. Opoku-Agyemang received her PhD from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature and a master’s from Paris-Sorbonne University. In 2020 she was named the University of Michigan’s Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney fellow, and she is currently a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council fellow. Her main area of research is humor in African literatures.