Thinking Globally

Across five chapters, Younis aims to show how “a wide-angle focus came to dominate Black Atlantic political thought in the 1920s and 1930s.” In his account, interwar anti-colonialists subverted imperial conceptions of globality to forge a “counterpolitics of scale.” As Younis writes:

Many Black intellectuals rejected the notion that the domain of the global was restricted to an imperial elite. They saw a theory of global order as necessary for the liberation of Africa and its scattered diasporas. By thinking on the scale of the world, they developed a distinct strategy for considering the problem of imperial rule.

Crucially, he argues, political thinking on this sweeping scale enabled an understanding of “race as a form of global hierarchy rather than a natural division of humanity.” Younis hopes that reconstructing this subterranean intellectual history might help with “rethinking the problem of human agency on the scale of the world” amid our current “planetary predicament.”

On the Scale of the World opens with a rereading of Marcus Garvey’s movement, with Younis suggesting that more cosmopolitan and solidaristic impulses tempered or sat alongside its racialist, inward, and chauvinist dimensions — which have been critiqued by Paul Gilroy and others. He digs up some intriguing snippets from the print archive to substantiate this argument.

In a 1923 editorial for his Negro World newspaper, Garvey focused on the Moroccan and Algerian troops who were taking part in the occupation of Germany. The North Africans had been “declassified from blackness” by the French state, he observed, appealing to them to recognize that their destinies were “linked up with all other men of color throughout the world.” The Moroccans and Algerians needed only to understand that “their first duty and interest” lay together with “the four hundred million Negroes of the world.”

Younis points also to the ambiguous meaning of the tricolor flag — red, black, and green ؅— that Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) adopted, which was apparently deliberate. On at least one occasion, Garvey explained its logic as follows: “Red showed their sympathy with the “Reds” of the world, and the Green their sympathy for the Irish in their fight for freedom, and the Black — the negro.”

This reflected the influence of Hubert Harrison, the West Indian–born radical who edited the UNIA newspaper. Harrison held up Ireland’s Sinn Féin and India’s Swadeshi movement as exemplars for the black freedom struggle.

Younis seems to be making two distinct claims about Garveyism. First, he wants to locate “a powerful, anticulturalist, deeply political strand of critical thinking about race within the shell of an apparent embrace of racial ideology.” But judging from the archival evidence that he lays out lucidly in this chapter, this strand of anti-essentialist thinking seems to have been more incidental — a residue of the early influence of Harrison and others on Garvey — than fundamental.

On the other hand, Younis argues that Garveyite nationalism — the question of cosmopolitan inflections aside — entailed a rejection of “naturalized international hierarchy” through its insistence on the immediate possibility of black sovereignty. This second claim seems much more convincing.

Before Dependency Theory

In the second chapter, Younis traces conceptions of the world in Anglophone West African thought, focusing in particular on the turn to understanding the region’s place in “the machinery of global order.” This meant transcending narratives that sought to valorize the African past and vindicate Africans as historical actors by shifting toward a recognition that they also had to confront the world “in which freedom was to be obtained.”

The core of Younis’s argument is that “structuralist” thinking was very much in evidence in interwar West Africa. Such thinking concerned the region’s subordinate place in the hierarchy of the “world system” as well as the centrality of racialized economic exploitation to colonial rule all over the world. These ideas were therefore not, he is eager to stress, an intellectual gift to Africa from Latin American dependency theorists several decades later.

One case study is J. W. de Graft-Johnson, a Gold Coast intellectual who studied law in London before penning Towards Nationhood in West Africa in 1928. Younis shows that De Graft-Johnson took a global conception of race and imperial subjection from his reading of the white supremacists Lothrop Stoddard and Maurice Muret — the notion of a world defined by a “disequilibrium in human destinies.”

E. Casely Hayford, editor of the Gold Coast Leader, also plays a prominent role in Younis’s reconstruction. Hayford, he writes, pointed to “the tragic impossibility of economic accumulation under a rigged system” and exposed “the racist doctrines propounded in Europe and implemented in Africa.”

Younis insists that the analyses put forward by the likes of De Graft-Johnson and Hayford did not simply reflect the thinking of the international communist movement at the time. These West African thinkers, he argues, were distinguished by “virtually always [stressing] the importance of race in the overall system of exploitation.” As the African Morning Post declared in 1938, after surveying labor conditions in Jamaica and the Gold Coast, “All over the world the fate of the negro race is identical . . . helpless before hydra-headed, inexorable and self-centred capitalism.”

There is no reason to doubt that this school of West African thought had its own intellectual provenance. Yet Younis doesn’t really demonstrate that it ascribed greater importance to race than, for example, a figure such as Trinidad’s George Padmore while he was a Communist International (Comintern) member.

Whether or not the West African tendency was distinctive in this respect, it is still of considerable interest in its own right. The fact that Marxist and non-Marxist thinkers in different places appeared to reach similar conclusions in parallel is notable in itself, and tells us something about the history of colonial capitalism and the way it was theorized.

White World, Black Labor

In another chapter, Younis recounts how black intellectuals based in Paris challenged arguments about the possibility of progress and assimilation within the French imperial system by focusing on race as a global structure. These critics dismissed the idea that the system “could possibly evolve to include their racialized populations on equal terms.”

Again, black intellectuals gleaned subversive political insights from reading white supremacist texts. La Race Nègre, the paper founded by Senegal’s Lamine Senghor after he broke with the French Communist Party, interpreted Stoddard’s writing as reflecting the centrality of white dominance to Western imperialism in all its guises.

Younis stresses that a new conception of scale was central to this form of politics. These black intellectuals argued that the “spatial limits of a racial and colonial order” were “impossible to contain within any individual imperial system” and emphasized the “transnational affinities” between different empires. This meant that it was vital to think and practice anti-colonialism on the same global scale as the empires it aimed to negate.

In chapter four, which may be the book’s most creative, Younis argues that thinkers such as Senghor, Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, and others around La Race Nègre “conceptualized how the world was ordered by race” in the form of a “body-world dialectic.” This involved two propositions: “First, the idea that colonialism was eliminationist, leading ineluctably to the destruction of Black people; and second, the idea that the Black body was defined at once by its loneliness and its labor.”

There was thus no contradiction between thinking on the intimate scale of the human body and on the grand scale of the world. In fact, the two were inseparable.

Paul Gilroy argued in his foundational 1993 book The Black Atlantic that a key point of divergence between the Black Atlantic tradition and Marxism was that “in the critical thought of blacks in the West, social self-creation through labour is not the centrepiece of emancipatory hopes.” Yet this was certainly not true of Padmore and C. L. R. James, nor of the West African thinkers Younis uncovers.

Indeed, much remains to be written on just how central conceptions of racialized proletarianization (and the emancipatory laboring subject it was seen to have produced) were to many visions of black anti-colonial politics. On the Scale of the World marks a useful contribution to this endeavor.

Past vs. Present

There is a tension running through the book, between the imperatives of intellectual history and the demands of political theory oriented toward the present, that becomes especially clear in sections like this. It is hard to avoid the sense that Younis is selecting archival fragments and retrospectively imbuing them with coherence and unity so that the history works more seamlessly for his theoretical intervention.

He argues, for example, that while Senghor and Kouyaté may not have been “writing directly about the body,” their thought anticipated “a reading of colonial sovereignty as necropolitical.” In one sense, this is a useful framing: showing how interwar thinkers might have prefigured the themes of today’s theorists draws our attention to overlooked intellectual antecedents.

But there is an attendant danger of stripping concepts of their meaning and historical specificity. In his suggestion that thinkers who developed theories about the centrality of black labor to the interwar global order were really writing about the body, foreshadowing the contemporary work of Achille Mbembe, Younis risks obscuring something of the intellectual history.

Flowing from these methodological dilemmas, it isn’t always clear whether Younis is arguing that the worldly scale of colonialism was the precondition of interwar Black Atlantic political thought or whether the thinking itself was global in scope. He mostly succeeds in demonstrating the latter, elegantly reconstructing the scalar shifts within anti-colonial thought.

At times, however, the argument about scale slides towards the first of these arguments and thus appears tautological. For example, he writes that the world was not “directly invoked” by the Gold Coast Leader, “but its scale implicitly made the whole argument possible.”

Overall, these are minor quibbles about an excellent study. The originality of the book’s construction is all the more impressive considering how many studies of Black Atlantic thought we already have at hand. Ultimately, Younis’s mission — “to sift through the globalisms” of the past and “locate those that can form the basis of world-encompassing collective action” — seems more worthwhile than a project of strict and faithful historical reconstruction.

It is, finally, worth asking how serviceable the interwar archive really is for our novel moment of ecological breakdown and resurgent “great power” rivalry — whether, as David Scott has considered, we can any longer think of futures in the terms developed by past anti-colonial militants.

There is, no doubt, much “buried intellectual treasure” to be excavated from the history of anti-colonialism. But this work cannot stand in for the grimmer and more challenging task of facing, and thinking anew about, our global order — one that, unlike the pasts that produced Kwame Nkrumah and Fidel Castro, is lacking clear emancipatory horizons or world-systemic alternatives.