Musab Younis | University of Oxford (original) (raw)
Books by Musab Younis
University of California Press, 2022
On the Scale of the World examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas that spread across th... more On the Scale of the World examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas that spread across the Atlantic between the two world wars. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Black intellectuals in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean established theories of colonialism and racism as structures that must be understood, and resisted, on a global scale. Bringing together literary and political texts from Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, France, the United States, and elsewhere, the book excavates a vibrant and understudied tradition of international political thought. From the British and French colonial occupations of West Africa to the struggles of African Americans, the hypocrisy of French promises of 'assimilation,' and the many-sided attacks on the sovereignties of Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia, On the Scale of the World shows how racialized imperialism provoked critical responses across the interwar Black Atlantic. By transcending the boundaries of any single imperial system, these counternarratives of global order enabled new ways of thinking about race, nation, and empire.
Academic papers and articles by Musab Younis
International Theory , 2023
In the third and final response, Musab Younis draws on Edward Said’s critique of ‘counter-convers... more In the third and final response, Musab Younis draws on Edward Said’s critique of ‘counter-conversion’ to suggest how anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers sought to create oppositional forms of knowledge while remaining alert, in ways not always replicated in recent writing, to the dangers of nativism.
Oxford Handbook of History and International Relations, 2023
This chapter sketches out two divergent options for rectifying the neglect of the Haitian Revolut... more This chapter sketches out two divergent options for rectifying the neglect of the Haitian Revolution in the eld of international relations. First, we can make a claim for Haiti's centrality to international politics by tracing the effects and repercussions of its revolution on the Caribbean, the Americas and the world at large. Alternatively, we can see Haiti’s revolution as exposing the limitations of the categories we use to measure significance and meaning when we study the international. This latter option means abandoning the idea of centrality altogether, drawing on Haiti’s own intellectual history to sketch an alternative view of the international: its forms of power, hierarchies, constraints, and possibilities.
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2023
Postcolonial Studies, 2023
Critical Studies on Security, 2022
London Review of Books, 2019
‘It is usually agreed in France,’ the poet and essayist Edouard Roditi wrote in 1962, ‘that Arabs... more ‘It is usually agreed in France,’ the poet and essayist Edouard Roditi wrote in 1962, ‘that Arabs have been gifted with greater manliness than us.’ Algeria had recently won its independence after a long war of liberation, and the loss was experienced by some French men as an emasculation, a feeling reinforced by stories of French soldiers castrated and disembowelled by Algerian fighters. ‘In Africa, it’s OPEN SEASON on Whites,’ the far-right monthly Europe-action proclaimed in 1965. Worse, France was now prey to an ‘Arab invasion’ that was turning France into a ‘bitch nation’.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2018
This article explores the role played by time in the maintenance of global racial difference with... more This article explores the role played by time in the maintenance of global racial difference with reference to the precarious sovereignties of Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia during the interwar period. It suggests that the experiences of these states, understood through the discourses which sought to both support and undermine them, point to a shift away from juridical division in global order and towards a hierarchy framed in terms of racialised temporalities. While postcolonial scholarship can help us to understand this shift, it has not fully comprehended the interpenetration of multiple forms of temporality in the service of colonial and racial ordering. For interwar intellectuals and activists committed to pan-African liberation, the desire for a new world order free from racialised stratification meant an engagement with sites of black sovereignty that was, by necessity, ambivalent and strategic in its approach to the politics of time.
London Review of Books, 2017
Review of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonisation and the Future of the World by Gary Wilder (Duk... more Review of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonisation and the Future of the World by Gary Wilder (Duke, 2015) in the LRB
Nations and Nationalism, 2017
The Belle Époque, often thought to be a period defined by nationalism, also saw the remarkable gl... more The Belle Époque, often thought to be a period defined by nationalism, also saw the remarkable global proliferation of transnational affinities – especially those centred on race. Across Europe and its settler territories, notions of pan-racial affinity spread alongside imperial nationalism, in the context of technological advancement that permitted novel imaginative possibilities. Meanwhile, texts of political imagination in Africa and Asia during this period – particularly those of pan-Africanism and pan-Islamism – demonstrate not only an awareness of the significance of racial thinking for Europe but a theorisation of the connections between Europe's racial imagination and its policies in the colonised world. The same advances in the fields of communication and travel that opened the door for new imaginative possibilities in Europe also enabled disparate communities in the colonised world to conceive of themselves, often for the first time, as collectively racialised subjects of a European world order.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2012
Review essay based on Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride (eds), Political Theories of Decolonizatio... more Review essay based on Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride (eds), Political Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Rahul Rao, Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
Magazine articles by Musab Younis
Criterion Collection, 2023
Ozu is not usually seen as a queer filmmaker. There are scattered references to what critic Tony ... more Ozu is not usually seen as a queer filmmaker. There are scattered references to what critic Tony Rayns calls his "homosexual impulses"-he was expelled from his boarding school dormitory after writing love letters to another boy; he never married. But Ozu's queerness goes beyond such biographical details. He displays a constitutively queer interest in the family's strangeness and inevitable dissolution, the difficulty that attends to trying to meet its expectations, the plight of those who find themselves outside its voracious and insistent claims. So he brings us unmarried young women; dying and disappointed parents; ungrateful, disobedient, and disillusioned children-and, as in Record of a Tenement Gentleman, widows.
London Review of Books, 2019
On 11 October, Julien Odoul, an official from the Rassemblement National, formerly the Front Nati... more On 11 October, Julien Odoul, an official from the Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National, interrupted a French regional council session to ask a woman in the audience either to remove her headscarf or leave. She was a volunteer accompanying children on a school trip. ‘Madame has ample time to wear her veil at home and on the street,’ Odoul said. ‘But not here, not today.’ When the council president refused to expel her, Odoul and his colleagues stormed out. A journalist took a photograph of the woman comforting her son, who was one of the children on the trip.
n+1 magazine, 2012
A friend who attended some of the court cases put me in touch with George (not his real name), a ... more A friend who attended some of the court cases put me in touch with George (not his real name), a 44-year-old black man from London who was arrested in a raid on his home some weeks after the riots. I traveled to his house in East London, not far from the Olympic venues, then hastily being thrown up, and we spoke for a couple of hours in his living room.
Book Reviews by Musab Younis
University of California Press, 2022
On the Scale of the World examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas that spread across th... more On the Scale of the World examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas that spread across the Atlantic between the two world wars. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Black intellectuals in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean established theories of colonialism and racism as structures that must be understood, and resisted, on a global scale. Bringing together literary and political texts from Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, France, the United States, and elsewhere, the book excavates a vibrant and understudied tradition of international political thought. From the British and French colonial occupations of West Africa to the struggles of African Americans, the hypocrisy of French promises of 'assimilation,' and the many-sided attacks on the sovereignties of Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia, On the Scale of the World shows how racialized imperialism provoked critical responses across the interwar Black Atlantic. By transcending the boundaries of any single imperial system, these counternarratives of global order enabled new ways of thinking about race, nation, and empire.
International Theory , 2023
In the third and final response, Musab Younis draws on Edward Said’s critique of ‘counter-convers... more In the third and final response, Musab Younis draws on Edward Said’s critique of ‘counter-conversion’ to suggest how anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers sought to create oppositional forms of knowledge while remaining alert, in ways not always replicated in recent writing, to the dangers of nativism.
Oxford Handbook of History and International Relations, 2023
This chapter sketches out two divergent options for rectifying the neglect of the Haitian Revolut... more This chapter sketches out two divergent options for rectifying the neglect of the Haitian Revolution in the eld of international relations. First, we can make a claim for Haiti's centrality to international politics by tracing the effects and repercussions of its revolution on the Caribbean, the Americas and the world at large. Alternatively, we can see Haiti’s revolution as exposing the limitations of the categories we use to measure significance and meaning when we study the international. This latter option means abandoning the idea of centrality altogether, drawing on Haiti’s own intellectual history to sketch an alternative view of the international: its forms of power, hierarchies, constraints, and possibilities.
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2023
Postcolonial Studies, 2023
Critical Studies on Security, 2022
London Review of Books, 2019
‘It is usually agreed in France,’ the poet and essayist Edouard Roditi wrote in 1962, ‘that Arabs... more ‘It is usually agreed in France,’ the poet and essayist Edouard Roditi wrote in 1962, ‘that Arabs have been gifted with greater manliness than us.’ Algeria had recently won its independence after a long war of liberation, and the loss was experienced by some French men as an emasculation, a feeling reinforced by stories of French soldiers castrated and disembowelled by Algerian fighters. ‘In Africa, it’s OPEN SEASON on Whites,’ the far-right monthly Europe-action proclaimed in 1965. Worse, France was now prey to an ‘Arab invasion’ that was turning France into a ‘bitch nation’.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2018
This article explores the role played by time in the maintenance of global racial difference with... more This article explores the role played by time in the maintenance of global racial difference with reference to the precarious sovereignties of Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia during the interwar period. It suggests that the experiences of these states, understood through the discourses which sought to both support and undermine them, point to a shift away from juridical division in global order and towards a hierarchy framed in terms of racialised temporalities. While postcolonial scholarship can help us to understand this shift, it has not fully comprehended the interpenetration of multiple forms of temporality in the service of colonial and racial ordering. For interwar intellectuals and activists committed to pan-African liberation, the desire for a new world order free from racialised stratification meant an engagement with sites of black sovereignty that was, by necessity, ambivalent and strategic in its approach to the politics of time.
London Review of Books, 2017
Review of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonisation and the Future of the World by Gary Wilder (Duk... more Review of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonisation and the Future of the World by Gary Wilder (Duke, 2015) in the LRB
Nations and Nationalism, 2017
The Belle Époque, often thought to be a period defined by nationalism, also saw the remarkable gl... more The Belle Époque, often thought to be a period defined by nationalism, also saw the remarkable global proliferation of transnational affinities – especially those centred on race. Across Europe and its settler territories, notions of pan-racial affinity spread alongside imperial nationalism, in the context of technological advancement that permitted novel imaginative possibilities. Meanwhile, texts of political imagination in Africa and Asia during this period – particularly those of pan-Africanism and pan-Islamism – demonstrate not only an awareness of the significance of racial thinking for Europe but a theorisation of the connections between Europe's racial imagination and its policies in the colonised world. The same advances in the fields of communication and travel that opened the door for new imaginative possibilities in Europe also enabled disparate communities in the colonised world to conceive of themselves, often for the first time, as collectively racialised subjects of a European world order.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2012
Review essay based on Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride (eds), Political Theories of Decolonizatio... more Review essay based on Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride (eds), Political Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Rahul Rao, Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
Criterion Collection, 2023
Ozu is not usually seen as a queer filmmaker. There are scattered references to what critic Tony ... more Ozu is not usually seen as a queer filmmaker. There are scattered references to what critic Tony Rayns calls his "homosexual impulses"-he was expelled from his boarding school dormitory after writing love letters to another boy; he never married. But Ozu's queerness goes beyond such biographical details. He displays a constitutively queer interest in the family's strangeness and inevitable dissolution, the difficulty that attends to trying to meet its expectations, the plight of those who find themselves outside its voracious and insistent claims. So he brings us unmarried young women; dying and disappointed parents; ungrateful, disobedient, and disillusioned children-and, as in Record of a Tenement Gentleman, widows.
London Review of Books, 2019
On 11 October, Julien Odoul, an official from the Rassemblement National, formerly the Front Nati... more On 11 October, Julien Odoul, an official from the Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National, interrupted a French regional council session to ask a woman in the audience either to remove her headscarf or leave. She was a volunteer accompanying children on a school trip. ‘Madame has ample time to wear her veil at home and on the street,’ Odoul said. ‘But not here, not today.’ When the council president refused to expel her, Odoul and his colleagues stormed out. A journalist took a photograph of the woman comforting her son, who was one of the children on the trip.
n+1 magazine, 2012
A friend who attended some of the court cases put me in touch with George (not his real name), a ... more A friend who attended some of the court cases put me in touch with George (not his real name), a 44-year-old black man from London who was arrested in a raid on his home some weeks after the riots. I traveled to his house in East London, not far from the Olympic venues, then hastily being thrown up, and we spoke for a couple of hours in his living room.
LRB Blog, 2021
There was an illegal demonstration for Palestine in northern Paris on Sunday, 15 May. It was quel... more There was an illegal demonstration for Palestine in northern Paris on Sunday, 15 May. It was quelled by 4200 police officers under the command of the city’s police chief, Didier Lallement. Protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza had been banned on the direct order of President Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin. They might be composed of ‘risky elements’, Darmanin warned. He asked the police to be ‘particularly vigilant and firm’.
London Review of Books Blog, 2020
It might seem bizarre to blame the murder of the French schoolteacher Samuel Paty on a nebulous c... more It might seem bizarre to blame the murder of the French schoolteacher Samuel Paty on a nebulous conspiracy of leftist academics, given that the perpetrator, Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, was an 18-year-old who had never been to university. But earlier this month in Le Monde, 100 French academics gave their backing to Jean-Michel Blanquer, the education minister, when he responded to the murder with a flood of invective against universities. ‘Islamo-leftism is wreaking havoc,’ he said. Paty’s murderer had been ‘conditioned by people who encourage’ a type of ‘intellectual radicalism’ and promote ‘ideas that often come from elsewhere’, i.e. from across the Atlantic. ‘The fish rots from the head,’ he added darkly.
