In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Musab Younis. Younis is Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. His book is On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Musab Younis: On the Scale of the World is about the anticolonial thought that spread across the print networks of the Black Atlantic—particularly in West Africa, the United States and France—between and during the world wars (1914–45). It draws on the writing of political activists, poets, journalists and newspaper editors who were all concerned in some way with the liberation of the African continent and diaspora from colonial domination. Their work was mostly published as articles in newspapers, but also included pamphlets and books.
Though they differed on many points, these political theorists frequently invoked the world as the irreducible scale of operation for colonized peoples. In recent years, popular conversations about race have often been territorial. Who has a right to claim which identity? These questions are usually separated from others, like the racialized nature of international power or the enduring disempowerment of many ex-colonized countries.
A century ago, Black Atlantic anticolonialists approached questions of racial definition and boundary in supple and connective ways. I dedicate the first chapter in the book to an analysis of Marcus Garvey’s newspaper, Negro World. While Garvey is often understood retrospectively as a nationalist and racialist, written across the Negro World is a much more dynamic conception of political community.
To take one example, Garvey wrote a fascinating editorial in 1923, titled “Are Moroccans and Algerians Negroes?” The editorial responded to lurid reports about the presence of the presence of African troops in the French occupation of the Rhineland—the so-called “black horror on the Rhine.” The French government had sought to defuse the international controversy in part by claiming that the Moroccan troops they were deploying in Germany were not actually ‘Negroes’. In response, Garvey mocked the desire to limit and define the category ‘Negro’ in a way that excluded North Africans. He pointed to the imperial interests served by rigid framings of race and argued that North Africans should understand their political interests, in light of world events, as connected to those of all other Africans. I suggest that moments like these show how a global vision was essential for pan-African radicals, shaping their views of race and solidarity.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
We can learn from the ambition of anticolonial intellectuals who were active a century ago. Sierra Leonean newspaper editors in the 1920s, Haitian anti-occupation activists in the 1930s, and African American radical writers in the 1940s—among many others—devoted considerable efforts to gathering evidence about world affairs. This evidence was often obtained with difficulty and in the face of forbidding colonial censorship. But these thinkers insisted that the racial-colonial order could only be resisted on the scale on which it operated.
The expansive vision of Black anticolonialists shows how scale can be at the core of radical attempts to reimagine politics and the self. It also suggests how political theories are developed in contexts of unequal power. While many have suggested that resistant ideologies must flatly reject dominant frameworks, I find a different method at work in the writing of anticolonialists. Their vision of the world was subversively adapted from the grammar of domination. It was a “surreptitious counter-narrative”, to adapt a phrase by Edward Said. It did not seek to destroy or escape the world, but to transform it.
Contemporary organizers might sometimes find that they are encouraged to think in blinkered terms—to focus on their own neighborhood, community or country, without considering how those units slot into global patterns of power. This can lead to a politics of jealously and resentment between groups who suffer collectively but differentially under global racial capitalism. Drawing on the anticolonial archive, one corrective to this ethos of insularity and competition is to re-emphasize the scale of the world as the premise of liberation.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
Primary among the ideologies that Black anticolonial thought challenges is localism. Localism—the privileging of the small scale—may seem inoffensive, even admirable. But localism has often been a strategy of power. Imperial power regularly seeks to use scale to its own advantage, monopolizing international and global thought and imposing on its subjects narrower frames.
As the Harlem-based writer and organizer Hubert Harrison pointed out in 1921, internationalism was celebrated by the official organs of “civilization” when it was imperialist and capitalist in nature. But “when any portion of the world's disinherited (whether white or black) seeks to join hands with any other group in the same condition, then the lords of misrule denounce the idea of internationalism.”
We might think of the turn to so-called indirect rule in the British Empire as a form of enforced localism. I explore in the book’s second chapter how West African anticolonialists, in response to indirect rule, rejected the boundaries of colonial discourse. By analyzing how the colonial West Africa was influenced by developments far beyond the region, they “jumped scales”, to borrow a term from the geographer Neil Smith.
Which intellectuals and/or intellectual movements most inspire your work?
As a work of intellectual history, On the Scale of the World is principally inspired by Black Atlantic interwar political thought. It draws in particular on the writing of English-speaking intellectuals in colonial West Africa (J. E. Casely Hayford, Kobina Sekyi, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Cornelius May); intellectuals and activists from the Caribbean based in the United States and Britain (Marcus Garvey, Hubert Harrison, George Padmore); African American intellectuals (W. E. B. Du Bois); and French-speaking African and Caribbean militants and intellectuals in interwar Paris (Lamine Senghor, Jane and Paulette Nardal, Aimé Césaire and Emile Faure).
But the anticolonial intellectual cultures of the 1920s–40s also involved many people—travelers, editors, pamphleteers, writers and funders—whose names have not been preserved in lists of canonical figures. Alongside writing by people whose names we know, I also draw on anonymous and unsigned essays and articles, especially in colonial West Africa. They were part of a West African culture of pseudonymous and anonymous writing that has been explored by Stephanie Newell in her book The Power to Name.
Moving beyond the interwar period, my work was inspired by the voluminous and sophisticated examinations of histories of Black internationalism and nationalism by scholars in the fields of history, literary studies and political theory, including Robin D. G. Kelley, Keisha N. Blain, Brent Hayes Edwards, Cheryl Higashida, Tiffany M. Gill, T. Denean Sharpley‐Whiting, Penny Von Eschen, J. S. Spiegler, Philippe Dewitte, Christopher Miller, and Adom Getachew.
A book that profoundly influenced my understanding of globality was the late geographer Denis Cosgrove’s book Apollo’s Eye. Theoretically, my conception of Blackness and space was informed by the work of Katherine McKittrick, especially her book Demonic Grounds, and the work of Achille Mbembe. Histories of global thought by scholars like Duncan Bell and Cemil Aydin were another important source.
Which two books published in the last five years would you recommend to BAR readers? How do you envision engaging these titles in your future work?
One book that comes to mind is Keguro Macharia’s inventive Frottage (NYU Press, 2019). Macharia challenges key concepts in queer studies through the lens of Black diaspora studies while also questioning the heterosexual couple as the focus of diasporic intimacy. Among its many insights, Frottage—challenging what Macharia calls “the geneological imperative”—shows us how forms of proximity don’t necessarily have to be understood through the lens of kinship.
It's seven years old, but I have to mention here Traces of History by Patrick Wolfe (Verso, 2016), a landmark structuralist theorization of race that shows in meticulous historical detail how race must be understood as the differential subjugation of populations in the service of the twin imperial desires for land and labor. As I suggest in On the Scale of the World, Wolfe’s conception is prefigured in the writing of interwar anticolonialists who often centered land and labor in their analyses of race and its vitiating impact on the colonized body.
Finally, Keisha N. Blain’s Set the World on Fire (Penn Press, 2018) is a remarkable history of Black nationalist women during the early- to mid-twentieth century who sought to encourage a "confraternity among all dark races", to quote the political activist Mittie Maude Lena Gordon. By underlining what she calls “black nationalist women's ideological complexity”, Blain expands our understanding of the history of Black nationalism and its relationship to forms of internationalism and feminism.
In my future work—partly inspired by these scholars—I’m planning to explore the convergences between anticolonial and feminist thought, two ethical traditions that have understood domination and liberation as connected across scales. I’m also working on a project that examines the intellectual history of the global North/South divide and asks why the idea of a divided world has been so important to anticolonial thought.
Roberto Sirvent is editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
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