On the Scale of the World: The Making of Black Anticolonial Thought
go through Musab Younis
University of California Press, 2022
Recently, as Netflix’s new sci-fi series The Three-Body Problem captivates audiences around the world, it elegantly reminds social scientists of a profound idea: a human race long tethered to sovereignty struggles to unite in the face of anarchy—unless outsiders Aliens invade Earth. The metaphor of aliens provides humans with a reflexive lens through which to understand themselves, presenting a different scale for observing world politics, that is, the scale of the earth. Traditionally, sovereign states have been regarded as major actors by “cold-blooded” mainstream international relations theorists. In this regard, looking at racial issues through the “color line” has been de-problematized, resulting in IR never being able to achieve true decolonization. However, if we expand our perspective to the universal scale of the planet, it becomes clear that international society should be made up of individuals with equal rights, regardless of their ethnic identity.
This planetary perspective, while seemingly contemporary, was articulated by black intellectuals as early as the interwar period, and is a key theme in Musab Younis’s latest book On the scale of the world Winner of the 2023 Sussex International Theory Prize. Through a meticulous study of historical archives in 13 cities in seven countries (p. 12), Younis works on “a conception of the world that spanned the interwar Black Atlantic culture of internationalism and nationalism. It focuses on An archive of anticolonial writing in English and French produced by French, American, and black West African writers (including journalists, politicians, writers, poets, novelists, travelers, anticolonial activists, historians, and scholars) , 6 pages). . These black intellectuals embraced a vision of an open world and fiercely rejected the notion that global affairs were the exclusive domain of white imperial elites. They “prioritized the scale of the world—not at the expense of or to the exclusion of other scales, but in the face of colonial domination. localized discourse” (p. 8).
As seen in a statement from the Sussex Awards, On the scale of the world “Nativist and culturalist charges against postcolonialism are implicitly addressed by presenting a self-conscious and immanent world-historical image of Black Atlantic internationalism and nationalism.” It contains five empirical chapters discussing the interwar period How black writers envision the world’s nations, structures, whiteness, bodies, and time. It demonstrates the textual mechanism of the “bottom-up” production and dissemination of black international thought, illustrating that the idea of global order has never been limited to elites—especially white elite actors.
In particular, the book weaves together quotations from newspapers, literary works, and other documents to create a poetic and metaphorical narrative that depicts how black political identity was oppressed and consolidated by white political discourse. It can be seen to some extent as a psychoanalysis of racial discourse.Cleverly echoes the intellectual background of progressivism since the nineteenth centurythIn “The White World of the Century,” Eunice describes how people of color are “enclosed in the past, alienated from the present, excluded from the future, or seen as always slipping back into prehistory” (p. 4) . The intertwined uncertainties of race and gender are then brought to light by imagining African lands as “feminized and virgin, awaiting the push, masculinity, and fecundity of the ‘white man'” (Newspaper view from London, p. 101) Sex becomes more important. Furthermore, when discussing how white people viewed the black world, Eunice mentioned that not only did white people despise them as savages, but they also feared that black people would become dominant and in turn dominate white people in the future. As a result, “whites in the empire actually presented a ‘united front’ to colonize and rule the black man and ‘keep him in his place’ (p. 90). White fear of blackness reversed the relationship between blackness and blackness in the colonial context the orthodox dialectic between white men, which enriches the text’s layered meaning and provides a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics within it.
All in all, this book innovatively constructs a discursive history of black international thought by using diverse historical materials and focusing on everyday narratives rather than orthodox “great thinkers” or “high politics” in international relations. It helps reverse Eurocentrism in the current discipline and promotes the development of global international relations. However, this book may pose a greater challenge to Eurocentrism from two other perspectives. While exploring the profound reflections on how globalization was produced by black intellectuals in the interwar period (p. 8), the book lacks an understanding of how they failed to transcend white progressivist epistemologies, thereby somehow replicating them on their own terms White ideology without reflection that recognizes this. First of all, the book does mention that European colonialism “led to the disintegration of African institutions and social forces and the suppression of African religions” and also caused Africans’ “fascination with European culture and the absurd scene of Africa imitating Europeans.” (page 92). However, the author does not answer in further detail whether black people’s imitation of white people leads to self-colonization. The psychological syndrome of the colonized against the colonizer is not only hateful, as Frantz Fanon said in ” the wretches of the earth But there is also “a look of desire, a look of envy… that sits at the settler’s table, sleeps in the settler’s bed” (1963, p. 39), and wants to take their place – another A core agenda worth exploring for future anticolonial research (for related research, see Umoren, 2018; Bryan, 2018).
Secondly, the black resistance arena chosen in this book is still geographically European territory—Sierra Leone, Lagos, Nigeria, Martinique, etc. ” Contributing to anti-colonial struggles in other regions. scale. In this sense, as noted above, the extent to which the discourses of black thinkers failed to subvert white notions of progressivism also undermined their ability to recognize the nature of the interwar global political order. For example, WEB Du Bois visited Manchuria in 1936. White man rule. However, when Japan, a good student of the West, actively colonized many Asian countries and rationalized its fascist agenda, the reality was very different. In the 1930s, it withdrew from the League of Nations, declared war on China, and massacred hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians. Du Bois adopted a teleological view of race, arguing that through non-white races uniting against white oppression, racial differences and oppression would eventually be eliminated. However, the question remains whether such a view represents a racially reductive interpretation of global politics, a subject that remains ripe for contemporary discussion.
Further reading on electronic international relations
