Anthony P. Maingot on Musal Younis’s *On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anti-Colonial Thought*

In the classical first novel by an American Black, Black Boy, Richard Wright describes his re-encounter with his long-estranged father, a poor sharecropper.

… I realized that, through ties of blood make us kin, though I could see a shadow of his face in my face … we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly different planes of reality.[1]

The words and worldview of the Father in this telling is not part of the story.  Musal Younis is interested in the world of the educated and politically involved son, who, like the rest of the similarly  Black British, French, and American intellectuals was active during the interwar years of WW I and WW II.  The body of writing these intellectuals produced and with which the author is well versed, shows that, like others in colonized territories, they were “intensely preoccupied with the question of understanding politics on the scale of the world”  (p. 6, emphasis added).  They were, as a group, intellectuals with a “wide angle focus” on the world.  They were, he concludes, determined to confront the world as a whole in order to “seize and transform it,” not to “escape or destroy it”  (p. 22).  This intellectual capture will occur, he says in a chapter entitled “The Whiteness of the World,” once that white world has to face “a common black identity,” which then “merely awaits the white world’s inevitable destruction”  (p. 99).

In order to make his case, he chooses to focus on three historical cases – Liberia, Ethiopia and Haiti.  In doing so he runs into the major historiographical problem which invariably bedevils studies of this genre – the problem (or fallacy) not of generalization as a heuristic devise which has its uses,[2] but of a linear, reductionist generalization called racial identity.  There is no explicit evidence that the author has questioned whether his extensive discussion of theory throws explanatory light on the quite distinct cases, or, alternatively, whether the cases throw fresh light on the theory. Since generalization is used to assist in finding a general principle from distinct cases, it appears that the author achieves neither goal.  If, as it would appear, the choice of these three countries was based on the fact that they were  politically  independent and as defined by the author as Black, that is not sufficient to warrant the cases intended to confirm a complex theory.

Since an in-depth analysis of all three cases is beyond this review, one example will illustrate this reviewer’s critique. Is there any evidence that the slave-owning feudal monarch, Haile Selassie, had a wide-angle scale of the world before Mussolini’s invasion?  Additionally, is it not a fact that the intellectuals who created the loudest world-wide outcry about Mussolini’s invasion and the shameful failure of the League of Nations to act, were two Trinidadians of radically different ideologies, Trotskyite C.L.R. James and pro-Soviet George Padmore, not Haitians or Liberians?  Even prior to the activities of these two intellectuals, it was another Trinidadian, Henry Sylvester Williams (1869-1911) who first spoke of and worked to build the Pan African Congress in 1900.[3]  Why did this still-colonial island produce such intellectuals with “a scale of the world?”

Finally, the post-modern style of language further decouples the theory from the case studies.  For example, regarding Liberia, the author says that “there existed a colonial-racial temporality that did not assign Liberia an allochronic stagnation in time but a stagnation in the present”  (p. 148).  It was Robert R. Palmer who advised us to avoid theoretical neologisms and “write in the ordinary language.”[4]

To return to Richard Wright meeting with his sharecropper father.  A similarity in race could not narrow the distance engendered by class and general circumstances. We know the son’s scale of the world because he wrote about it.  What was the father’s scale?  Careful, therefore, when generalizing about a “world-scale” based on racial identity.

[1]         Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937), p. 30.

[2]         Cf. Historian says Louis Gottschalk, use generalizations at different levels and of different kinds. They all agree that some good purpose is served when they do.” (Louis Gottschalk, “Summary”, in Luis Gottschalk (ed.), Generalization in the Writing of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 208.

[3]         See, James R. Hooker, Henry Sylvester Williams: Imperial Pan-Africanist (London: Rex Collings, 1975).

[4]         See, Robert R. Palmer, in Gottschalk, p. 67.