“Land[s] beyond the White World”: (Re)imagining the International through Fiction

Abstract

From the turn of the nineteenth century Black Internationalists collectively mapped and subverted the (white) International as a colonial legal imaginary, its sociopolitical, historical and geographical myths and those of “modern” International Law. While the most visible artefacts of this world(un)making project are conventional—namely, the Pan-African Conference and Congresses of 1900, 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927 and 1945—Black Internationalists also turned to fiction to both imagine and craft the worlds they could not live without and dismantle the worlds they could not live within (to paraphrase Ruha Benjamin). This article traces these poetic and political worldmaking and unmaking practices through the novels of Pauline Hopkins, WEB DuBois and Peter Abrahams, and maps their intersections with International Law. Doing so surfaces their “alternative clocks and maps of global racial resistance” (per Charles Mills), and suggests pathways to lands (still) “beyond the White World” and its calcified colonial legal imaginaries. It also reveals the worlds that International Law makes, and those it (still) makes impossible.

Keywords:

• Black Internationalism
• Third World Approaches to International Law
• Critical Race Theory
• Law and Literature

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 WEB DuBois, “News from Pan-Africa,” (1921) W.E.B. Du Bois Papers. Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

2 See Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998), 97–8.

3 DuBois, “Pan-Africa”.

4 Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 2.

5 See Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2019).

6 DuBois, “Pan-Africa,” 1, 25.

7 See Robin DG Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). On the Black Radical Tradition, see Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021 [1983]).

8 DuBois, “Pan-Africa.”

9 Report of the Pan-African Conference, held on the 23rd, 24th and 25th July 1900 (on file), 10.

10 See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 38.

11 WEB DuBois, “Of the Culture of White Folk,” Journal of Race Development 7, no.4 (1917): 444.

12 See further Charles W. Mills, “Unwriting and Unwhitening the World”, in Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line, ed. Anievas, Manchanda and Shilliam (Oxford: Routledge, 2015), 208.

13 See Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

14 See Bill Schwarz, The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 62.

15 The original draft is held by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The quotes that follow are taken from this draft novel.

16 See Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

17 John Westlake, Chapters on the Principles of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894), 198.

18 Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 4.

19 Ibid., 328.

20 Gerry Simpson, “Imagination,” in Concepts for International Law: Contributions to Disciplinary Thought, ed. Jean d”Aspremont and Sahib Singh (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2019), 421, 415.

21 See Robert Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97 (1983–84): X.

22 Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word,” Yale Law Journal 95 (1985–6): 1601.

23 Samera Esmeir, “On Becoming Less of the World,” History of the Present 8, no. 1 (2018): 88, 98.

24 Ibid., 90.

25 Slaughter, Human Rights, 20, 10.

26 Esmeir, “Becoming,” 91.

27 See Martin Delaney, Blake; or The Huts of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017 [1859 & 1861–2]).

28 Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory & Meaning: Blacks & the Regimes of Race in American Theater & Film Before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), xii.

29 Ruha Benjamin, “Introduction,” in Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, ed. Ruha Benjamin (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 14.

30 Reprinted in Pauline Hopkins, The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

31 WEB DuBois, Dark Princess (Jackson: Banner Books, 1995 [1928]).

32 Peter Abrahams, A Wreath for Udomo (London: Faber & Faber, 1977 [1956]).

33 Mills, “Unwriting:” 209.

34 See Peter Fitzpatrick, The Mythology of Modern Law (London: Routledge, 1992); Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 64.

35 JM Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: The Guilford Press, 1993).

36 Stevenson, “Ideal Commonwealth”.

37 Ibid.

38 See Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

39 Lassa Oppenheim, “Editor’s Introduction,” in The Collected Papers of John Westlake on Public International Law, ed. Lassa Oppenheim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), x.

40 Westlake, Chapters, 198, Oppenheim, Collected Papers,146.

41 See Christopher Gevers, “‘Unwhitening the world’: Rethinking Race and International Law”, UCLA Law Review 67 (2021): 1652.

42 Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer, 41, 88, 2.

43 See Roslyn Jolly, “Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Maine, and the Anthropology of Comparative Law,” Journal of British Studies 45, no.3 (2006): 556–80; and Gevers, “Rethinking Race and International Law”.

44 J.W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 159.

45 Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1861), 22, 77–78.

46 Ibid., 23; Henry Sumner Maine, Village-Communities in the East and West (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1876) 16. See further Travers Twiss, “The Free Navigation of the Congo,” in The Story of the Congo Free State, ed. Henry Wellington Wack (New York: GP Putnam’s Sons, 1905), 504–5.

47 Lewis R. Gordon, “Race Theory,” in Encyclopedia of Political Theory: Volume III, ed. Mark Bevir (California: Sage Publications, 2010), 1133.

48 Ibid.

49 Robinson, Forgeries, xii.

50 Anghie, Imperialism, 103.

51 WEB DuBois, “The Souls of White Folk,” The Independent (Aug. 18, 1910): 339; Mills, Blackness Visible, xiv.

52 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 14–15. See further Schwarz, White Man’s World.

53 DuBois, “Souls of White Folk”, 339.

54 Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osborne, The Wrecker (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892).

55 Blaut, Colonizer’s Model, 5–7.

56 John Westlake, International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 40.

57 Robert Louis Stevenson, A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892), 1.

58 Ibid.

59 Stevenson and Osborne, The Wrecker, 167–8.

60 Ibid., 159.

61 See Fitzpatrick, Mythology, 101.

62 Stevenson and Osborne, The Wrecker, 160.

63 Blaut, Colonizer’s Model, 1.

64 Ibid., 2, 7–8, 32–43.

65 Blaut, Colonizer’s Model, 16.

66 Stevenson and Osborne, The Wrecker, 468–9.

67 Matthew Craven, “Theorizing the Turn to History in International Law,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law, ed. Anne Orford and Florian Hoffman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 25.

68 See David Armitage, “The Contagion of Sovereignty: Declarations of Independence since 1776,” South African Historical Journal 52, no.1 (2005): 1–18.

69 Stephen Press, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017) 18, 35.

70 Travers Twiss, The Oregon Territory (New York: Appleton & Co, 1846), 112; Twiss, “The Congo”.

71 Press, Rogue Empires, 241.

72 Ibid., 98.

73 Twiss, “The Congo”, 507.

74 James Brooke, “Proposed Exploring to the Asiatic Archipelago,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 8 (1838): 445.

75 Michael Steer, “Sir James Brooke, KCB (Obituary),” Transactions of the Devonshire Association 2, no. 1 (1867): 311.

76 Ibid.

77 Ibid., 9, 6.

78 Ibid., 7.

79 See Anghie, Imperialism, 65–100; Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer, 140–1.

80 Oppenheim, Collected Papers, 146.

81 Lassa Oppenheim, International Law: Peace (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1905), 264–5. It is repeated in all subsequent editions.

82 Hopkins, Of One Blood.

83 Robbie Shillliam, “Race and research agendas,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26, no.1 (2013): 155.

84 Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces (Boston: Colored Co-operative Publishing, 1900) 13–14.

85 Robinson, Forgeries, xii.

86 Schwarz, White Man’s World, 62.

87 Report of the Pan-African Conference, 10.

88 Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womenhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Women Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 134, 140.

89 See, for example, Mills, Blackness Visible, 97–118.

90 Robinson, Forgeries, xii.

91 Edward W. Said, Culture & Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), xii.

92 H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (Cassell, 1885).

93 See further Christopher Gevers, “‘Hiding in Plain Sight’: Black Panther, International Law and the ‘Development Frame’,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 59, no. 1 (2022): 109.

94 John Buchan, Prester John (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1910).

95 Ibid., 72.

96 Abrahams, Wreath for Udomo, 234.

97 Ibid., 205–206.

98 See Gevers, “Black Panther” 125–6.

99 Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009 [1988]) 166 (noting: “[The] dominant culture invented an eternal West, unique since the moment of its origin. … The product of this Eurocentric vision is the well-known version of Western history – a progression from Ancient Greece to Rome to feudal Christian Europe to capitalist Europe… This construct…[amongst other things] removes Ancient Greece from the very milieu in which it unfolded and developed – the Orient – in order to annex Hellenism to Europe arbitrarily; [and] retains the mark of racism, the fundamental basis on which European cultural unity was constructed…”). See further Blaut, Colonizer’s Model, 57; Robinson, Black Marxism, 82.

100 See, for example, Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, 286; Buchan, Prester John, 94–5.

101 Hopkins, Contending Forces, 14.

102 Hazel V. Carby, “Introduction,” in Magazine Novels (see note 30).

103 See WEB DuBois, The Negro (New York: Holt, 1915).

104 Hopkins, Of One Blood.

105 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Claremont: Coyote Canyon Press), 45.

106 Justin Leroy, “Racial Capitalism and Black Philosophies of History” in Histories of Racial Capitalism, eds. Destin Jenkins and Justine Leroy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 171.

107 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 75.

108 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 55.

109 Geoffrey Sanborn, “The Pleasure of Its Company: Of One Blood and the Potentials of Plagiarism,” American Literary History 32 (2019): 6.

110 See Ira Dworkin, “Black Livingstone: Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood, and the Archives of Colonialism,” American Literary History 30 (2018): 15–19.

111 Hopkins, Of One Blood, 565. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 10; 1900 PAC Report, 11. See Dworkin, “Black Livingstone”: 15.

112 Ibid., 18.

113 Georoid O Tuothail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (London: Routledge, 1996), 42.

114 DuBois, Dark Princess, 296–97.

115 See especially ibid., 23.

116 Ibid., 7. See further WEB DuBois, “Culture of White Folk”; and Gevers, “Rethinking Race and International Law.”

117 See further Christopher Gevers, “Refiguring Slavery Through International Law: The 1926 Slavery Convention, the “Native Labor Code; and Racial Capitalism,” Journal of International Economic Law 25, no.1 (2022): 312–3.

118 DuBois, Dark Princess, 64.

119 See Saidiya Hartman, “Introduction: The Dead Letter of the Law,” in The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, ed. WEB DuBois (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1894]).

120 DuBois, The Negro.

121 See Hartman, “Introduction” (quoting WEB DuBois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995 [1940]), xxx.

122 See Robin DG Kelley, “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,” Journal of American History 86, no.3 (1999): 1045–77.

123 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 85.

124 WEB DuBois, “Inter-racial Implications of the Ethiopia Crisis,” Foreign Affairs (October, 1935): 83–4, 92.

125 WEB DuBois, “The Negro and the League of Nations,” DuBois Papers.

126 WEB DuBois, “The League of Nations,” The Crisis 19, no.1: 336.

127 WEB DuBois, “Memorandum on the future of Africa,” circa 1918, DuBois Papers.

128 DuBois, “The Negro and the League”.

129 Abrahams, Wreath, 275, 75.

130 Ibid., 36. See further at 75.

131 Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997), ix

132 See Christopher Gevers, “‘To Seek with Beauty’”; Getachew, Worldmaking.

133 Reprinted in The Crisis 23, no.1 (November, 1921): 8–9.

134 Walter Rodney, “Aspects of the International Class Struggle in Africa, the Caribbean and America,” in Pan-Africanism: Struggle against Neo-Colonialism and Imperialism, ed. Horace Campbell (Toronto: Afri-Carib Publications, 1975).

135 Manu Goswami, “Imaginary Future and Colonial Internationalisms,” American Historical Review 117, no.5 (2021): 1462.

136 Matthew Craven, “Statehood, Self-Determination, and Recognition”, in International Law, ed. Malcolm Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd Ed, 2010), 204. Westlake opened his inaugural lecture as Whewell Chair at Cambridge by insisting while the “geographical” – by which he meant the “knowledge of the actual distribution of the world into states…[with] idea boundaries, comparable to physical ones” – was certainly part of International Law, it was the part he counselled his pupils to think the least about (locating it “lowest in [the] philosophical order”). Oppenheim, Collected Papers, 393.

137 Gerry Simpson, “Something to do with States,” in Oxford Handbook (note 71 above), 569.

138 According to Maine: “The difference between the stationary and progressive societies is…one of the great secrets which inquiry has yet to penetrate. . . . [An] indispensable condition of success is an accurate knowledge of Roman law in all its principal stages.” Maine, Ancient Law, 23–24 & 77.

139 Westlake, Chapters, 191.

140 Mills, Racial Contract, 56.

141 Westlake, International Law, 1.

142 Ibid., 46.

143 Westlake, International Law, 46.

144 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 2008 [1952]), 4.

145 Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonising International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 56.

146 Anghie, Imperialism, 100.

147 Henry Sumner Maine, Village Communities in the East and West (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1876), 237–8.

148 Oppenheim, Collected Papers, 79–80.

149 Armitage, Foundations, 13, 28; and David Armitage, “The Contagion of Sovereignty: Declarations of Independence since 1776,” South African Historical Journal 52, no.1 (2005): 3 (citing NG Onuf, “Sovereignty: Outline of a Conceptual History,” Alternatives 16 (1991): 430.

150 See generally Trouillot, Silencing.

151 Armitage, “Contagion,” 12.

152 Abrahams, Wreath, 213.

153 Pauline Hopkins, “Toussaint L’Overture,” Colored American Magazine 2, no.1 (1900): 10.

154 Pauline Hopkins, “Munroe Rogers,” Colored American Magazine 6, no.1 (1902): 22.

155 Buchan, Prester John, 72–3.

156 Siba N. Grovogui, Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 20.

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Notes on contributors

Christopher Gevers

Christopher Gevers teaches international law and legal theory in the School of Law of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and is a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School.