"Noblesse Oblige for the Anticolonial Age; Or, What Was the 'African Elite'?" 

This talk argues that nobility is the missing link to understanding Russia's resonance for African anticolonial state-building, at least where literary historiography is concerned. Working from the Russian eighteenth century to Ghanaian independence in the mid twentieth – from Peter the Great's Table of Ranks to the consolidation of African elites through an ideal of national service – it repositions the Russia-Africa connection outside the Cold War frame, viewing it instead through the lens of aristocracy’s cultivation along meritocratic lines.

Jeanne-Marie Jackson received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University in 2012, and joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2014. Her work attends to questions of comparative method, literature and philosophy, and interpretive scale, mainly in the framework of African literature and intellectual history. In 2021, she was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.  

Jackson's most recent book is The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing (Princeton 2021), which 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. Extending from the Fante Coast in the early twentieth century to contemporary South Africa and Zimbabwe, it charts the increasingly fraught place of deep reflection in an evolving range of narrative structures. In 2023 it was awarded Honorable Mention for the Book of the Year – Scholarship Prize from the African Literature Association.  

Her first book, South African Literature's Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation (Bloomsbury 2015), is centrally concerned with how Russia's nineteenth-century Golden Age of literature and ideas provides a model for the study of South African realist forms and epistemologies in both English and Afrikaans, during and after apartheid. It also argues for perceived disconnection as a source of far-flung transnational affinities, challenging the salience of “the global” as both method and hermeneutic category.  

Jackson's third book, “The Letter of the Law in J.E. Casely Hayford’s West Africa,” is under contract with Princeton University Press. A concept-driven account of Casely Hayford's written work in the context of his legal and political career, it positions him as a key figure to modernist anticolonial thought, as well as African and British imperial legal and literary history. Her co-edited critical edition of Casely Hayford’s 1911 novel, Ethiopia Unbound, is soon forthcoming with Michigan State University Press. A co-edited volume with Cajetan Iheka, Intellectual Traditions of African Literature 1960-2015, is also forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. 

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, and The Hopkins Review. Jackson is Senior Editor of ELH.