Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Panther, International Law and the “Development Frame”

Authors

Christopher Gevers, School of Law, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Document Type

Article

Abstract

This article explores the “troubling antinomies” of the 2018 film Black Panther and its entanglements with the collective fantasies of the West—and those of international lawyers and development technocrats in particular—through its reliance on the “lost world” genre, as typified by H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and John Buchan’s Prester John. The article then situates these troubling antinomies within the tradition of Black Internationalism and the novels of Pauline Hopkins, George S. Schuyler, and Peter Abrahams as practices of “poetic revolt.” Doing so, it is argued, reveals much about the conditions of possibility of the “development frame” and international law, their shared “White Mythology,” and their ongoing entanglements with history, racial capitalism, and the discourse of technology

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Citation Information

Gevers, Christopher. "Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Panther, International Law and the “Development Frame”." Osgoode Hall Law Journal 59.1 (2022) : 109-152.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.60082/2817-5069.3739
https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/ohlj/vol59/iss1/5

References

1. (Marvel Studios, 2018) at 00h:07m:10s-00h:07m:20s [Black Panther].

2. Ibid at 00h:01m:10s-00h:01m:35s.

3. The first tourism advertisement is labelled "Come to Wakanda - After" and is a slick, high-speed montage of various shots of Wakanda from the movie, accompanied by a techno beat. The second is labelled "Come to Wakanda - Before." The "before" and "after" presumably refer to the revelation of Wakanda's secret to the world, but also recall the progressive teleology of modernity and development. See "Come to Wakanda - After" in Black Panther, supra note 1 (Bonus Feature); "Come to Wakanda - Before" in Black Panther, supra note 1 (Bonus Feature).

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" in Hopes and Impediments (Doubleday, 1988) 1 at 3.

8. Ibid at 2-3.

9. Ibid at 16.

10. Ibid at 17.

11. Ibid.

12. Mark Dery, "Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose" in Mark Dery, ed, Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke University Press, 1994) 179 at 180. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822396765-010

13. Black Panther, supra note 1 at 00h:07m:34s. #BringBackOurGirls was a 2014 online campaign for the return of over three hundred Nigerian girls who had been kidnapped by Boko Haram from a school in Chibok. For a critical discussion of this campaign and the biomediation of retributive justice at the expense of structural and historical redress, see Kamari Maxine Clarke, "Biomediation and the #BringBackOurGirls Campaign: Making Suffering Visible" in Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan Africanist Pushback (Duke University Press, 2019) 116. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478007388-004

14. Black Panther, supra note 1 at 00h:12m:38s. In an earlier film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe series, when the Black Panther is first introduced, a Wakandan "goodwill mission" is caught up in an attack in Lagos. See Captain America: Civil War (Marvel Studios, 2016) at 00h:03m:07s, 00h:36m:47s. When Killmonger ascends the throne in Black Panther, he asks "[w]here was Wakanda" when "Black folks started revolutions" in America. See supra note 1 at 01h:29m:34s.

15. "Africanfuturism" is a term coined by writer Nnedi Okorafor to distinguish her work from Afrofuturism." According to Okorafor, "Africanfuturism is similar to "Afrofuturism" in the way that blacks on the continent and in the Black Diaspora are all connected by blood, spirit, history and future….Africanfuturism is specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view as it then branches into the Black Diaspora, and it does not privilege or center the West." "Africanfuturism Defined" (October 2019), online (blog): Nnedi's Wahala Zone Blog < nnedi. blogspot.com/2019/10/africanfuturism-defined.html >.

16. As Darryl C Thomas defines it, Black Internationalism is a worldview that considers "the role of race and racism in world affairs and…the connections between racial capitalism and the color line in world affairs," and argues that "victims of racial capitalism and imperialism-the world's so-called darker (non-European) races-shared a common interest in overthrowing white supremacy and creating a new world order based on social justice and racial equality." See "Cedric J. Robinson's Meditation on Malcolm X's Black Internationalism and the Future of the Black Radical Tradition" in Gaye Theresa Johnson & Alex Lubin, eds, Futures of Black Radicalism (Verso, 2017) 148 at 148. For an overview of Black Internationalism, see Michael O West & William G Martin, "Contours of the Black International: From Toussaint to Tupac" in Michael O West, William G Martin & Fanon Che Wilkins, eds, From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) 1.

17. See e.g. Cedric J Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Zed Books, 1983) [Robinson, Black Marxism]; Robin DG Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002).

18. See Louiza Odysseos, "Stolen Life's Poetic Revolt" (2019) 47 Millennium J Intl Studies 341. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829819860199

19. In the sense that it is not only a claim about the past (i.e., history), but a claim to have a past, or to be historical subjects (i.e., historicity). See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995) at 6-8.

20. A formulation used by Jacques Derrida in reference to both how Western metaphysics "dim[med] the colors of the ancient fables" and "effaced in itself that fabulous scene which brought it into being," and how whiteness "assembles and reflects Western culture." See "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy," translated by FCT Moore (1974) 6 New Literary History 5 at 11. Here it is used as a composite phrase to triangulate the way that both international law and "development" rely on and produce, theoretically and historically, Western myths about "race," "law," and "the past." For an account that focuses on "modern law" as a White Mythology, see Peter Fitzpatrick, The Mythology of Modern Law (Routledge, 1992) [Fitzpatrick, Modern Law]. For an attempt to further specify Fitzpatrick's account in respect of modern international law, see Christopher Gevers, "'Unwhitening the World': Rethinking Race and International Law" (2021) 67 UCLA L Rev 1652 [Gevers, "Unwhitening the World"]. For an account that focusses on "race" (and "whiteness") as a White Mythology, see Charles W Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997) (arguing, inter alia, that "white" people "live in an invented delusional world, a racial fantasyland, a 'consensual hallucination'" at 18) [Mills, Racial Contract]. For an account of Western history as a White Mythology, see Robert JC Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, 2nd ed (Routledge, 2004) (which aims "to develop an epistemological critique of the West's greatest myth - History" at 2).

21. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, 2004) at 3 [Fanon, Wretched].

22. A good candidate for one of the principal originators of this myth in international law is Henry Sumner Maine. See Gevers, "Unwhitening the World," supra note 20 at 1667-75.

23. As Robinson puts it: "Racial regimes are…unstable truth systems…[which] may fragment, desiccated by new realities, which discard some fragments wholly while appropriating others into newer regimes.…[T]he production of race is chaotic. It is an alchemy of the intentional and the unintended, of known and unimagined fractures of cultural forms, of relations of power and the power of social and cultural relations. Racial regimes are constructed social systems in which race is proposed as the justification for relations of power. While necessarily articulated with accruals of power, the covering conceit of a racial regime is a makeshift patchwork masquerading as memory and the immutable." Cedric J Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theatre and Film before World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) at xii [Robinson, Forgeries of Memory]. On the metaphysics of race, see also Charles W Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 2015) at 41-66.

24. For accounts of international law that emphasize racial and economic subordination, respectively, see Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law (University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2004). See generally Mills, Racial Contract, supra note 20; JM Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (Guilford Press, 1993); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (Columbia University Press, 1983).

25. See Fitzpatrick, Modern Law, supra note 20 at ix. They are what Edward W Said termed "contrapuntal ensembles," identities that cannot exist by themselves but require "an array of opposites, negatives, oppositions." Said noted, "Greeks always require barbarians, and Europeans Africans, Orientals, etc." See Culture and Imperialism (Vintage Books, 1994) at 52 [Said, Culture]. As Trouillot puts it, "this Other was a Janus, of whom the Savage [or the primitive] was only the second face. The first face was the West itself." See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) at 18 [citations omitted] [Trouillot, Global Transformations].

26. On the relationship between literature and international law, see Joseph R Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (Fordham University Press, 2007); Christopher Gevers, "International Law, Literature and Worldmaking" in Shane Chalmers & Sundhya Pahuja, eds, Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities (Routledge, 2021) 191 [Gevers, "International Law"]. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003170914-19

27. (Cassell, 1885).

28. Richard F Patteson, "King Solomon's Mines: Imperialism and Narrative Structure" (1978) 8 J Narrative Technique 112 at 112.

29. WEB Du Bois, The World and Africa and Color and Democracy in Henry Louis Gates Jr, ed, The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois (Oxford University Press, 2007) vol 9 at 20 [Du Bois, World and Africa].

30. Said noted that the "[t]he prototypical modern realistic novel is Robinson Crusoe, and certainly not accidentally it is about a European who creates a fiefdom for himself on a distant, non-European island." Said, Culture, supra note 25 at xii.

31. Supra note 28 at 112-14 [emphasis added].

32. Ibid at 112.

33. (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1910) [Buchan, Prester John].

34. Ibid at 96 [emphasis added]. Later on, Laputa himself agrees with Crawfurd's assessment. Notably, a similar plot takes place in King Solomon's Mines, where the rightful King, Umbopa, is restored to the throne. Like Killmonger, his father was killed by his uncle. See Haggard, supra note 27.

35. Buchan, Prester John, supra note 33 at 134, 276.

36. Ibid at 96-97.

37. Black Panther, supra note 1 at 01h:30m:39s.

38. Buchan, Prester John, supra note 33 at 278.

39. Black Panther, supra note 1 at 00h:56m:04s-00h:57m:12s. Ulysses Klaue speaks this quote to Agent Ross.

40. (Delivered at the United States Capitol, 20 January 1949), published by the National Archives at the Harry S Truman Library and Museum, online: https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/19/inaugural-address . See Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (Cambridge University Press, 2011) at 44-94.

41. Truman, supra note 40.

42. Ibid.

43. Du Bois, World and Africa, supra note 29; Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Howard University Press, 1974).

44. Global Transformations, supra note 25 at 1-3. Trouillot notes: "From the beginning, the geography of imagination went hand in hand with a geography of management that made possible-and was in turn refueled by-the development of world capitalism and the growing power of North Atlantic states. Just as the West was global from the start, capitalism, as an economic system premised on continuous spatial expansion, was also global from the start (ibid at 2)."

45. See Gevers, "Unwhitening the World," supra note 20 at 1668-69.

46. Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2009) at 80. Koskenniemi uses the "men of 1873" to refer to the group of white men who established the Institut and re invented "modern international law" (ibid at 92). See ibid, ch 1.

47. Martin Thomas & Andrew Thompson, "Empire and Globalisation: from 'High Imperialism' to Decolonisation" (2014) 36 Intl History Rev 142 at 144. https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2013.828643

48. See Uma Kothari, ed, A Radical History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies (Zed Books, 2005); Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, translated by Patrick Camiller, 4th ed (Zed Books, 2014); Anghie, supra note 24; Pahuja, supra note 40.

49. As Rist puts it, "If colonization threw up an array of arguments justifying intervention outside Europe to serve the national interest, the League of Nations legitimated the internationalization of this intervention in the name of civilization itself, considered as the common heritage of the European countries." Supra note 48 at 58 [emphasis in original].

50. Ibid at 61 [emphasis omitted]. Similarly, Anghie argues that "the effect of the Mandate project was…to translate the categories of civilization and non-civilization into the categories of the advanced and the backward, the developed and the developing and to develop a richly textured and detailed vocabulary by which these differences could be assessed and administered." Supra note 24 at 204.

51. (William Blackwood and Sons, 1906) [Buchan, Lodge].

52. Ibid at 165.

53. Ibid at 40-43.

54. Ibid at 166, 170. It was necessary in this regard to distinguish between a "long settled" and "fully developed" dependent (like India), which required only "control, amend[ment] here and there," and "the benefit of our protection," and "lands where the fabric of civilisation has to be built up from the beginning" (ibid at 167, 170).

55. Supra note 29 at 20.

56. Ibid.

57. Du Bois called this the beginning of "imperial colonialism." Ibid at 38.

58. When Haggard visited South Africa in 1914 the Natal Witness newspaper noted: "Who shall say how many strong and sturdy pioneers have been attracted from the pleasant Homeland to help in winning the African wilds to civilization as the result of romantic interest aroused in them when as boys they read and reveled in these romances? It has been said that Haggard did more to advertise South Africa to the world when it was less known than it is now than any man of his time." The Natal Witness (27 March 1914), cited in Stephen Coan, "'When I Was Concerned With Great Men and Great Events': Sir Henry Rider Haggard in Natal" (1997) 26 Natalia 17 at 48 [emphasis added].

59. See generally Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane, The Making of a Racist State: British Imperialism and the Union of South Africa, 1875-1910 (Africa World Press, 1996); Bill Schwarz, The White Man's World (Oxford University Press, 2011).

60. Buchan, Prester John, supra note 33 at 182.

61. Later on, Haggard went even further, arguing that history vindicated not just English settlers' presence but their entire colonial imperial enterprise. See H Rider Haggard, "Preface" in The Honourable A Wilmot, Monomotapa (Rhodesia): Its Monuments, and its History from the Most Ancient Times to the Present Century (T Fisher Unwin, 1896) xiii at xvii-xxiv [Haggard, "Preface"].

62. The other legal means of claiming ownership and colonial title was by the "consent" of present owners (i.e., the "native chiefs"), a means that Haggard included, for good measure, when the new King Ignosi tells the Europeans that "ye shall have as many [diamonds] as ye can take hence." See supra note 27 at 276.

63. Ibid at 309.

64. Ibid at 279, 309.

65. The ownership of the secret cave full of gold "discovered" by Crawfurd is settled "by the law" (i.e., shared evenly with "the Crown"), while the diamonds in the possession of "native" labourers are deemed to be stolen. The alternative, contemplated in the novel, was to treat the gold as "spoils of war, since, [the Attorney-General] argued, it was the war chest of the enemy we had conquered." This path is abandoned, in part because "the [legal] claim was a bad one," but the idea of treating the armies of the Black rebellion as belligerents raises a number of interesting questions in international law. See Buchan, Prester John, supra note 33 at 368-69. Incidentally, at the time the novel was published, the person in control of both Mines and Defence was Jan Smuts.

66. Ibid at 135.

67. Ibid at 48. This illicit trade in diamonds by Laputa was "a pretty flourishing trade" that included sending "cases of consignments to Johannesburg houses, the contents of which did not correspond with the invoice," which the Government officials missed because "[t]hey never dreamed of danger from the natives" (ibid at 136).

68. Supra note 27 at 354.

69. Buchan, Prester John, supra note 33 at 369 [emphasis added].

70. Further, see Simon Lewis, "The Expatriate Africa Novel in English" in Simon Gikandi, ed, The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean Since 1950, vol 11 (Oxford University Press, 2016) 87 at 89.

71. Black Panther, supra note 1 at 00h:00m:14s.

72. Ibid at 02h:01m:34s, 02h:05m:33s.

73. Ibid at 00h:56m:20s-00h:56m:45s [emphasis added].

74. Achebe, supra note 7 at 16.

75. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell University Press, 2014) at 112 [emphasis added].

76. Lindy Stiebel, "Creating a Landscape of Africa: Baines, Haggard and Great Zimbabwe" (2001) 28 English in Africa 123 at 128 [emphasis added].

77. Haggard was convinced that Great Zimbabwe was "undoubtedly of Phoenician origin." See "Preface," supra note 42 at xv. In King Solomon's Mines, he reassures his readers by suggesting that the entrance to the diamond minds was perhaps "designed by some Phoenician official who managed the mines." Supra note 27 at 286.

78. John Buchan, The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction (William Blackwood and Sons, 1903) at 9.

79. Buchan, Prester John, supra note 33 at 94-95.

80. Supra note 75 at 158.

81. See Du Bois, World and Africa, supra note 29 at 13.

82. Buchan, Prester John, supra note 33 at 96.

83. Matthew Nye, "Linguistic Crossings: African Essentialism in King Solomon's Mines" 29 ANQ 98 at 98. See also Adas, supra note 75 at 159-64. Notably, Haggard's only praise for the "science" of the "Kukuanas" is in the Introduction by the novel's hero Allan Quatermain, which praises "their proficiency in the art of smelting and wielding metals" for the purpose of making "primitive" weapons. Supra note 27 at viii.

84. Ibid at 188.

85. One Sir Henry gets the would-be leader Umbopa to agree that, if they perform their "magic," when he becomes the Chief, he will ensure that no man "shall…die the death without trial or judgment." Ibid at 190. See also Shane Chalmers & Sundhya Pahuja, "(Economic) Development and the Rule of Law" in Jens Meierhenrich & Martin Loughlin, eds, The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press) [forthcoming in 2021], online: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3313805 .

86. Haggard, supra note 27 at 18-19. https://doi.org/10.4039/Ent1918-1

87. See Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law (JM Dent & Sons, 1917) at 13-15. As Adas notes, "For many Europeans the differences between their own highly developed, technologically and scientifically oriented societies and what they perceived to be backward and superstitious African cultures were merely manifestations of the vast gap in evolutionary development." Supra note 75 at 164.

88. Adas, supra note 75 at 3, 204. According to Adas: "By the mid-eighteenth century, scientific and technological gauges were playing a major and at times dominant role in European thinking about such civilizations as those of India and China….In the industrial era, scientific and technological measures of human worth and potential dominated European thinking on issues ranging from racism to colonial education. They also provided key components of the civilizing-mission ideology that both justified Europe's global hegemony and vitally influenced the ways in which European power was exercised (ibid at 3-4)."

89. Ibid at 403.

90. Truman, supra note 40.

91. As Du Bois puts it, "Without the winking of an eye, printing, gunpowder, the smelting of iron, the beginnings of social organization, not to mention political life and democracy, were attributed exclusively to the white race and to Nordic Europe." World and Africa, supra note 29 at 14.

92. Ibid at 293. As Robinson notes, "A pall of sadness becomes almost a constant presence for anyone who wishes to revisit the corrupt association between American science and race in the century-the nineteenth-which ended with the appearance of moving pictures." Forgeries of Memory, supra note 23 at 1.

93. Black Panther, supra note 1 at 00h:00m:19s.

94. Coltan is an abbreviation of columbite-tantalite, prevalent in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. See Michael Nest, Coltan (Polity Press, 2011).

95. See Iron Man (Marvel Studios, 2008).

96. Black Panther, supra note 1 at 00h:00m:13s. Vibranium's organic properties are revealed in the opening lines of the film, when we are told that "a meteorite made of vibranium…struck the continent of Africa, affecting the plant life around it" (ibid).

97. At one point, Shuri remarks that "if [Killmonger] gets control of our technology, nowhere will be safe." See ibid at 01h:39m:04s.

98. Ibid at 02h:05m:15s [emphasis added].

99. The situation between Iraq and Kuwait, UNSCOR, 4644th Sess, UN Doc S/RES/1441 (2002), 1 at 1. Agent Ross asks T'Challa, "Your father told the UN that Klaue stole all the vibranium you had, but now he's telling me you have more?" Black Panther, supra note 1 at 00h:57m:46s.

100. In a deleted scene called "UN Meet and Greet," Agent Ross-now a friend of T'Challa-warns him against revealing the secret of Wakanda's vibranium stockpile. He says, "I really don't think you should do this. What you guys have is going to scare a lot of people in that room. They're going to come after you." See Black Panther, supra note 1 (Bonus Feature) at 00h:00m:32s.

101. See UK, "The Legality of Using Force in Iraq," Memorandum of Professor Christopher Greenwood, CMG, QC (24 October 2002), online: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmfaff/196/2102406.htm .

102. The biopic Fair Game (Summit Entertainment, 2010) tells the story of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, who was outed by the Bush administration when her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times contesting the claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to source yellowcake uranium in Niger. The op-ed was called "What I didn't Find in Africa."

103. Buchan, Prester John, supra note 33 at 369.

104. See Kelley, supra note 17. In charting the "freedom dreams" of selected Black intellectuals, activists, and artists, Kelley shows how they "not only imagined a different future, but in many instances their emancipatory vision proved more radical and inclusive than what their compatriots proposed" (ibid at 6).

105. Reprinted in The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (Oxford University Press, 1988) [Hopkins, Of One Blood].

106. See The Colored American Magazine 6 (November 1902).

107. Briggs is unable to secure a job when his mixed-race heritage becomes known to the medical establishment, likely at the hand of his false friend Aubrey Livingston. See Hopkins, supra note 105.

108. Ibid at 494.

109. Briggs' participation is orchestrated by his friend-turned-rival, Livingston, who is in love with Brigg's wife, Dianthe. See ibid at 496.

110. Ibid at 546. According to Diop, "The Ethiopia of the Ancients was really the Sudanese kingdom with its two successive capitals: Napata and Meroë. Modern Ethiopia is more directly the heir to the civilization of Axum." See Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, translated by Mercer Cook (Lawrence Hill Books, 1974) at 294.

111. Hopkins, Of One Blood, supra note 105 at 547.

112. Laputa gains support for his uprising by claiming that Africans "had a great empire in the past, and might have a great empire again." Buchan, Prester John, supra note 33 at 131.

113. Hopkins, Of One Blood, supra note 105 at 621.

114. McDowell argues that Briggs was "clearly modeled" on Du Bois, as Hopkins was "[l]ong a champion of Du Bois." See Deborah E McDowell, "Introduction" in Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood (Simon & Schuster, 2010) (electronic version).

115. Mathew Townes, a Black American doctor, is prevented from pursuing his medical career due to the "color line" and flees America for Europe, where he gets caught up in and later leads-a secretive global organization called the Great Council of the Darker Peoples, struggling against "White World" supremacy (a precursor to Killmonger's failed global revolution). See WEB Du Bois, Dark Princess: A Romance (University Press of Mississippi, 1995).

116. Robert A Hill & R Kent Rasmussen, "Afterword" in George S Schuyler, Black Empire, ed by Robert A Hill & R Kent Rasmussen (Northeastern University Press, 1991) 259 at 289 [Schuyler, Black Empire, ed by Hill & Rasmussen].

117. George S Schuyler, The Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius Against the World [Schuyler, Black Internationale] in Schuyler, Black Empire, ed by Hill & Rasmussen, supra note 116, 1 at 51.

118. Schuyler, Black Internationale, supra note 117 at 10. As I discuss in detail elsewhere, one of the remarkable features common to these novels is the absence of both international law and international institutions, despite the fact that Du Bois's and Schuyler's novels were written during the "Age of Internationalism." See Gevers, "Unwhitening the World," supra note 20 at 1677.

119. Schuyler, Black Internationale, supra note 117 at 15.

120. Ibid.

121. Ibid, ch IV.

122. George S Schuyler, "Strange Valley," Pittsburgh Courier (18 August-10 November 1934).

123. At the time that Schuyler wrote the novel, the combined effects of the Depression and looming war on the European diamond market meant that "the United States [was] the only real market for De Beers's diamonds," and "in 1938 three quarters of all the cartel's diamonds were sold for engagement rings in the United States." See Edward Jay Epstein, "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?," The Atlantic (February 1982), online: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you-ever-tried-to-sell-a-diamond/304575/ .

124. Stuart Hall et al, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, 2nd ed (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) at 353.

125. Schuyler, Black Internationale, supra note 117 at 16.

126. Ibid at 328.

127. Black Internationale also maps in finer detail the domestic and international dimensions of global white supremacy, the relationship between them, and the transnational nature of racial whiteness. In order to prevent the United States from "intervening to save the prestige of the white race" that would necessarily suffer as a result of the end of white rule in Africa, the Black Internationale instigates internal civil unrest in America (a tactic Dr. Belsidus declares is modelled on the "British Imperialistic policy of 'Divide and Rule'"). As a result, when a "powerful faction in America" proposes intervening to thwart the Black Internationale's violent decolonization of Africa, the "constant instigation of civic strife" by the "White Americans" means that the United States is "unable to 'compose' its internal affairs, let alone compos[e] those of Africa." Ibid at 78, 138-39 [emphasis added]. See also Gevers, "Unwhitening the World," supra note 20 at 1681-84.

128. Schuyler, Black Internationale, supra note 117 at 139.

129. See further George Padmore, ed, History of the Pan African Congress, 2nd ed (Hammersmith Bookshop, 1963).

130. See e.g. Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People (Heinemann, 1966); Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Devil on the Cross (Heinemann, 1980); Wole Soyinka, Season of Anomy (Rex Collings, 1973).

131. See Christopher Gevers, "To Seek with Beauty to Set the World Right: Cold War International Law and the Radical 'Imaginative Geography' of Pan-Africanism" in Matthew Craven, Sundhya Pahuja & Gerry Simpson, eds, International Law and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2019) 492. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108615525.022

132. Peter Abrahams, A Wreath for Udomo (Faber and Faber, 1956) at 206 [Abrahams, Wreath for Udomo].

133. Ibid at 254.

134. West & Martin, supra note 16 at 5.

135. Patteson, supra note 28 at 113.

136. A 1968 FBI Memo outlining the five long-term goals of the "COINTELPRO" against "militant black nationalist groups" in America began by noting, "[i]n unity there is strength; a truism that is no less valid for all its triteness. An effective coalition…might be the first step toward a real 'Mau Mau' in America, the beginning of a true black revolution." See Joshua Bloom & Waldo E Martin, Black Against Empire: The History an