On a global scale: the formation of black anticolonial thought
By Moussab Younis
University of California Press, 2022
Recently, as Netflix’s new sci-fi series “3 Body Problem” captivates audiences around the world, it has elegantly reminded social scientists of a profound notion: all of humanity, long trapped within limits of sovereignty, struggle to unite in the face of anarchism – unless aliens invade Earth. The alien metaphor provides humanity with a reflective lens through which to understand itself, presenting a different scale for observing global politics, namely that of the planet. Sovereign states have traditionally been seen as the main actors by traditional “cold-blooded” IR theorists. In this regard, the issue of race, seen through the “color line,” has been de-problematized, leading to the persistent failure of IR to achieve true decolonization. However, if we broaden our vision to the universal scale of the planet, it becomes evident that the global community should be made up of individuals enjoying equal rights, regardless of their racial identity.
This global perspective, although apparently contemporary, was articulated by black intellectuals from the interwar period, the central theme of Musab Younis’ latest book. Worldwide who won the Sussex International Theory Prize 2023. Through meticulous research in the historical archives of 13 cities in 7 countries (p. xii), Younis strives to “reconcile himself with the idea of the world through the cultures of internationalism and nationalism of the -two wars. It focuses on an archive of anticolonial writings in English and French produced by black writers, including journalists, politicians, writers, poets, novelists, travelers, anticolonial activists, historians and academics , in France, the United States and West Africa. p.3, 6). These black intellectuals championed an open vision of the world, vehemently rejecting the idea that global affairs were the exclusive domain of the white imperial elite. They “gave priority to the global scale – not to the detriment or exclusion of other scales, but in the face of the relentlessly provincializing discourses of the colonial regime” (p. 8).
As seen in the statement of the Sussex Prize, Worldwide “implicitly responds to nativist and culturalist accusations against postcolonialism by demonstrating the conscious and intrinsic world-historical dimension of Black Atlantic internationalism and nationalism.” It contains five empirical chapters, dealing with how interwar black writers envisioned the nation, structure, whiteness, body, and world time. It demonstrates the textual mechanisms by which black international thought was produced and traveled “from below”, illustrating that ideas of world order were never simply confined to the elite – particularly to actors of the white elite.
In particular, the book crafts a poetic and metaphorical narrative by weaving together quotes from newspapers, literary works, and other documents, illustrating how black political identity was oppressed and solidified by white political discourses. We can, to a certain extent, see it as a psychoanalysis of racial discourses. Faithfully echoing the progressive epistemological context since the 19thIn the world of whiteness in the last century, Younis describes how people of color were “sealed in the past, alienated from the present, written from the future, or seen as always reverting to a prehistoric state” (p. 4). Then, by imagining African land “as feminized and virginal, awaiting the powerful, masculine reproductive power of the ‘white man'” (a London newspaper, p. 101), the uncertainties intertwined in questions of race and gender become clearly apparent. Furthermore, when discussing how white people view the black world, Younis mentions that white people not only looked down on them as barbarians, but also feared that black people would become dominant in the future and rule in turn. on white people. As a result, “the white peoples of the Empire had, in effect, to show a “united front” to colonize and rule the black man and “keep him in his place” (p. 90). This white fear of the Black inverts the orthodox dialectical relationship between Blacks and Whites in the context of colonization, which enriches the text with layers of meaning and allows for a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics at play.
In summary, this book innovatively constructs a discursive history of black international thought by adopting a wide range of historical sources and focusing on everyday narratives rather than orthodox “great thinkers” or IR “high politics” . It contributes to overturning the current Eurocentrism in the discipline and advances the development of Global IR. Yet the book could pose a greater challenge to the Eurocentric orientation from two other angles. Although it explores deep reflections on how interwar black intellectuals produced globality (p. 8), this book lacks reflection on how they failed to move beyond white progressive epistemology and thus have somehow reproduced ideologies of whiteness on their own terms without acknowledging it. First, the book indeed mentions that European colonialism “led to the disintegration of African institutions and social forces, the suppression of African religions”, which also caused “the fetishization of European culture by Africans and the ridiculous spectacle of African imitation of Europeans. (p.92). Yet the author does not go into detail to determine whether imitation of blacks by whites led to self-colonization. The psychological syndrome of the colonized towards the colonizer was not only hateful, as Frantz Fanon said in The wretched of the earth but also “a look of desire, a look of envy… to sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in the settler’s bed” (1963, p. 39), and to want to take their place – another central program worthy of our investigation into future anticolonial research (for related research, see Oumoren, 2018; Blain, 2018).
Second, the book’s chosen arena for black resistance remains geographically located in the European dominions – Sierra Leone, Lagos, Nigeria, Martinique, etc. Ideally, we could trace in more detail how their doctrines contributed to anticolonial struggles in other regions through a truly “universal.” ladder. In this sense, as mentioned above, the discourse produced by black thinkers has failed, to some extent, to overturn white ideas of progressivism, which also diminishes their ability to perceive the nature of order world politics of the interwar period. For example, WEB Du Bois visited visited Manchuria in 1936. Facing Japan’s victory over Russia in a war in 1905, Du Bois saw Japan as a beacon of hope for the “yellow race,” longing for a united front of Asian peoples against white domination. However, the reality was quite different when Japan, as a good student of the West, actively colonized many Asian countries and rationalized its fascist programs. In the 1930s, it withdrew from the League of Nations, declared war on China, and carried out the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians. Du Bois adopted a teleological racial perspective, positing that racial differences and oppression would ultimately be eliminated through the solidarity of non-white races against white oppression. Yet the question remains whether such a perspective represents a racially reductive interpretation of world politics, a topic still ripe for contemporary debate.
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