Musab Younis's "On the Scale of the World"

Musab Younis is Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought, and reported the following:

Page 99 of On the Scale of the World comprises the end of a chapter, “The Whiteness of the World”. The chapter is about how Black writers confronted the idea of Whiteness between the two world wars. In poetry, novels and political texts, these writers described the operation of a racial ideology that elevated Europe above its subjugated peoples. They saw Whiteness as spanning the world, transcending boundaries between empires and states. And they mused on the impossibility of progress or justice or equal treatment for those classified as "non-Whites" under this binary system. They came to these conclusions through a series of surreptitious readings of racist and colonial texts.

Reading page 99 gives an accurate sense of the project of the book as a whole, which excavates archives of interwar Black writing in both English and French in order to rethink imperial globality. "The Whiteness of the World” chapter specifically explores critical writing about Whiteness. It draws on archives produced by African and Caribbean intellectuals in Paris and journalists in West Africa during the 1920s and 1930s. Whiteness still tends to be seen “from above”, through the eyes of its self-confessed acolytes. More recently, scholars have rightly credited African American intellectuals—especially James Baldwin and W. E. B. Du Bois—as theorists of Whiteness "from below”.

But this chapter shows that a skeptical analysis of Whiteness stretched far beyond the United States. For Senegalese pan-Africanists in Paris and political activists in West Africa, it formed part of a distinct theorization of empire. It showed how the imperial order was at once global and racial, fixing colonized peoples in space and time. And, by the same token, it also indicated the route towards a counter-imperial politics. The obverse of the White world was a rival globe-spanning vision: what Public Enemy would later articulate as a Black planet.

Learn more about On the Scale of the World at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue