“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.