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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2024
There is a growing body of literature calling for the decolonisation of International Relations (IR) theory. This literature, which includes perspectives from the Global South, Indigenous, and feminist approaches, has explained how the colonial thought and White supremacy of early IR scholars like Wilson, Reinsch, and Schmitt shaped the contemporary field and is still reflected in mainstream understandings of core concepts like peace, sovereignty, and security. The need to decolonise IR is well established, but the way to do so is not always clear. This paper explores how engaging with the global politics of Afro-Caribbean Rebel Music serves the decolonisation effort. We can understand Rebel Music as a form of knowledge that emerged in dialogue with, and continues to reproduce ideas embedded in, global and anti-colonial Black approaches to IR theory. Textually and sonically, Rebel Music critiques the nation-state as the primary agent of peace, security, and identity, imagines a transnational Black identity, and is one of the primary forms in which we can hear the voice of the marginalised communicate their understanding of world politics. Engaging with Rebel Music is thus one avenue to decolonising contemporary IR.
1 As Lutan Fiyah said, ‘I never heard a music so sweet / I repeat / It’s the heartbeat.’ To help the reader listen to the heartbeat of Rebel Music, I have assembled a playlist of the songs included here on YouTube, available at: {https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFAXMrbMNCwo9Y4_kiaLHAN08w1s-LfTB&si=z9yFqBbxJwprjfn6} and on Spotify, available at: {https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3JSdEBTdN5frhs9tRA0xx6?si=5176a37f3b4b4a36}.
2 Robert Vitalis, ‘The noble American science of imperial relations and its laws of race development’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52:4 (2010), pp. 909–38; Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Kelebogile Zvogbo and Meredith Loken, ‘Why race matters in International Relations’, Foreign Policy (2020), available at: {https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/19/why-race-matters-international-relations-ir/}.
3 Cynthia Weber, Queer International Relations: Sovereignty, Sexuality and the Will to Knowledge (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016).
4 Errol A. Henderson, ‘The revolution will not be theorised: Du Bois, Locke, and the Howard School’s challenge to white supremacist IR theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 45:3 (2017), pp. 492–510; Vitalis, ‘The noble American science of imperial relations and its laws of race development’.
5 I also want to distinguish Black IR from the overlapping Howard School of thought, in that several of the writers discussed here (including Marcus Garvey, Roger Mais, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o) were not part of the Howard School.
6 Amitav Acharya, Rethinking Power, Institutions and Ideas in World Politics: Whose IR? (London: Routledge, 2014); Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, The Making of Global International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Zeynep Capan, ‘Decolonising International Relations?’, Third World Quarterly, 38:1 (2017), pp. 1–15; Zvogbo and Loken, ‘Why race matters in International Relations’.
7 Maureen Konkle, ‘Indigenous ownership and the emergence of US liberal imperialism’, American Indian Quarterly, 32:3 (2008), pp. 297–323; Sheryl Lightfoot, Global Indigenous Politics (London: Taylor and Francis Group, 2016); Sheryl Lightfoot, ‘Decolonizing self-determination: Haudenosaunee passports and negotiated sovereignty’, European Journal of International Relations, 27:4 (2021), pp. 971–94; Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1:1 (2012), pp. 1–40.
8 Melanie Richter-Montpetit and Cynthia Weber, ‘Queer International Relations’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics(2017), available at: {https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.265}; Weber, Queer International Relations.
9 Carol Cohn, ‘Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12:4 (1987), pp. 687–718; Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Completely Revised and Updated (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); J. Ann Tickner, ‘You just don’t understand: Troubled engagements between feminists and IR theorists’, International Studies Quarterly, 41:4 (1997), pp. 611–32.
10 Lucy Taylor, ‘Decolonizing International Relations: Perspectives from Latin America’, International Studies Review, 14:3 (2012), pp. 386–400 (pp. 397–8).
11 Kevin C. Dunn, ‘Never mind the bollocks: The punk rock politics of global communication’, Review of International Studies, 34:S1 (2008), pp. 193–210.
12 Steve Smith, ‘Singing our world into existence: International Relations theory and September 11’, International Studies Quarterly, 48:3 (2004), pp. 499–515.
13 Damascus Kafumbe, Tuning the Kingdom: Kawuugulu Musical Performance, Politics, and Storytelling in Buganda (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2018).
14 Rafiki Ubaldo and Helen Hintjens, Music and Peacebuilding: African and Latin American Experiences (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).
15 Philip Maysles, ‘Dubbing the nation’, Small Axe, 11 (2002), pp. 91–111.
16 Cecelia Lynch, ‘The moral aporia of race in International Relations’, International Relations, 33:2 (2019), pp. 267–85; Vitalis, ‘The noble American science of imperial relations and its laws of race development’.
17 Charles Wade Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
18 Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 47–8.
19 Paul S. Reinsch, Colonial Government: An Introduction to the Study of Colonial Institutions (New York, NY: MacMillan, 1902), pp. 12–14.
20 Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, p. 47.
21 Paul S. Reinsch, World Politics at the End of the Nineteenth Century (Adamant Media, 1900), p. 254.
22 Hans Joachim Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), p. 358.
23 Michael W. Doyle, ‘Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs, part 2’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 12:4 (1983), pp. 323–53; ‘Liberalism and world politics’, The American Political Science Review, 80:4 (1986), pp. 1151–69; Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
24 John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Back to the future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War’, International Security (1990), pp. 5–56.
25 Hope Dancy, ‘False success? A re-evaluation of war data framed by territorial sovereignty’ [Paper presentation] (International Studies Association Annual Meeting, 2023: Montreal, Canada), pp. 9–10.
26 Nathan Andrews, ‘International Relations (IR) pedagogy, dialogue and diversity: Taking the IR course syllabus seriously’, All Azimuth, 9:2 (2020), pp. 1–15; David Lake, ‘White Man’s IR: An intellectual confession’, Perspectives on Politics, 14:4 (2016), pp. 1112–22.
27 Yong-Soo Eun, ‘An intellectual confession from a member of the “non-white” IR community: A friendly reply to David Lake’s “White Man’s IR”’, Political Science, 52:1 (2019), pp. 78–84; Branwen Gruffydd Jones (ed.), Decolonizing International Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Lake, ‘White Man’s IR’; Daniel Maliniak, Susan Peterson, Ryan Powers, and Michael Tierney, ‘Is International Relations a global discipline? Hegemony, insularity, and diversity in the field’, Security Studies 27:3 (2018), pp. 1–37.
28 Molly King, Carl Bergstrom, Shelley Correll, Jennifer Jacquet, and Jevin West, ‘Men set their own cites high: Gender and self-citation across fields and over time’, Socius, 3 (2017), pp. 1–22; Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne, ‘Citation matters: Mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of “conscientious engagement”’, Gender, Place, and Culture, 27:7 (2017), pp. 954–73.
29 Vitalis, ‘The noble American science of imperial relations and its laws of race development’.
30 ‘Speech by Marcus Garvey – September 1937’, available at: {https://www.druglibrary.net/olsen/RASTAFARI/GARVEY/blackman3712.html}. The mention of Aristotle is particularly apropos, given Aristotle’s clearly stated belief in The Politics that the ‘natural slave’ was fit for no other purpose than slavery, a view widespread in White political philosophy during colonialism.
31 Sonjah Stanley-Niaah, Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010).
32 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 73.
33 George Revill, ‘Hiawatha and pan-Africanism: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912), a Black composer in suburban London’, Ecumene, 2:3 (1995), pp. 247–66 (p. 252).
34 Revill, ‘Hiawatha and pan-Africanism’.
35 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1903).
36 W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘Criteria of Negro art’, The Crisis, 32:6 (1926), pp. 290–7.
37 Steven Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Charles Alex Patrick, ‘Contradictions and misconceptions in the life, music, and philosophy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’, GNOSI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Human Theory and Praxis, 4:3 (2021), pp. 164–77; Stanley-Niaah, Dancehall.
38 Paul Gilroy, ‘It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at … The dialectics of diasporic identification’, Third Text, 5:13 (1991), pp. 3–16; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Paul Gilroy, ‘Diaspora’, Paragraph, 17:3 (1994), pp. 207–12.
39 Alain Locke, The New Negro (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 6.
40 The importance to the Black liberation movement of the image of Ethiopia as a symbol of Black anti-colonial resistance and pan-Africanism has been described by the early writings of Garvey, the text The Promised Key by Howell, and by Du Bois. See W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘Inter-racial implications of the Ethiopian crisis: A Negro view’, Foreign Affairs, 14:1 (1935), pp. 82–92.
41 K. W. J. Post, ‘The politics of protest in Jamaica, 1938: Some problems of analysis and conceptualization’, Social and Economic Studies, 18:4 (1969), pp. 374–90 (p. 387).
42 ‘“Selassie no god,” Ethiopians told’, Pittsburgh Courier (1950–1954), Dec 9, 1950, p. 30, available at: {https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/inaugural-session/docview/202258693/se-2}.
43 George Eaton Simpson, ‘The Ras Tafari movement in Jamaica: A study of race and class conflict’, Social Forces, 34 (1955), pp. 167–71 (p. 167).
44 ‘The Rastafarians Dream of Africa’, The Times, 54811 (1960), p. 9.
45 M. G. Smith, Roy Augier, and Rex Nettleford, ‘The Rastafari movement in Kingston, Jamaica. Part 1’, Caribbean Quarterly, 13:3 (1967), pp. 3–29 (p. 14).
46 Horace Campbell, ‘Rastafari as Pan Africanism in the Caribbean and Africa’, African Journal of Political Economy/Revue Africaine d’Economie Politique, 2:1 (1988), pp. 75–88 (p. 75).
47 Rupert Lewis, Walter Rodney: 1968 Revisited (Kingston, Jamaica: Canoe Press, 1994), p. 1.
48 Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (New York: Verso Press, 2019), pp. 72–3.
49 ‘Bob Marley Rare Interview: What is reggae, why smoke marijuana?’ (2010). In standard English, this would say: ‘This music deals with a reality. The other half that has never yet been told. The youth tell it through music, and they chose reggae music. Reggae music is like the news. Reggae music is the people music.’
50 M. Peggy Quattro, ‘Bounty killer: The Poor People’s Governor. 1997 interview & 2020 update’, available at: {https://reggaereport.com/2020/06/11/bounty-killer-the-poor-peoples-governor-1997-interview-2020-update/}. In standard English, the last part would say: ‘The people branded me the Poor People’s Governor, because they know a lot of people will talk about ghetto issues, but then abandon the struggle. I never stray from the struggle. I always have a ghetto concept [in my music].’
51 Ubaldo and Hintjens, ‘Music and peacebuilding’, p. 7.
52 Philip Ewell, ‘Music theory and the white racial frame’, MTO: A Journal of the Society for Music Theory, 26:2 (2020), available at: {https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.2/mto.20.26.2.ewell.html}; Adam Neely, ‘Music theory and White supremacy’ (2020); Carl Schachter, ‘Elephants, crocodiles, and Beethoven: Schenker’s politics and the pedagogy of Schenkerian analysis’, Theory and Practice, 26 (2001), pp. 1–20.
53 Leon Botstein, ‘Schenker the regressive: Observations on the historical Schenker’, The Musical Quarterly, 86:2 (2002), pp. 239–47 (p. 239).
54 Ewell, ‘Music theory and the white racial frame’.
55 Ewell, ‘Music theory and the white racial frame’.
56 Revill, ‘Hiawatha and pan-Africanism’, p. 251.
57 Paul S. Reinsch, ‘The Negro race and European civilization’, American Journal of Sociology, 11:2 (1905), pp. 145–67 (p. 152).
58 Mark Christian Thompson, Anti-Music: Jazz and Racial Blackness in German Thought between the Wars (Ithaca, NY: SUNY Press, 2018).
59 Graham Macklin, ‘“Onward Blackshirts!” Music and the British Union of Fascists’, Patterns of Prejudice, 47:4–5 (2013), pp. 430–57.
60 Such sentiments are visible throughout the popular discourse, as illustrated in a 2021 video by the musician Adam Neely (Neely, ‘Music theory and white supremacy’).
61 Gilroy, ‘It ain’t where you’re from...’, p. 7.
62 Du Bois, ‘Criteria of Negro art’.
63 Amilcar Cabral, ‘National liberation and culture’, Transition, 45 (1974), pp. 12–17; Ewell, ‘Music theory and the white racial frame’; Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Points French, 1971); Gilroy, ‘It ain’t where you’re from...’; bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).
64 ‘Mortimo Planno in Jimmy Cliff’s “Bongo Man” Documentary’ (2020).
65 Leonard Barrett, The Rastafarians (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1997), p. 193.
66 ‘Kette drum, kette drum, let me hear the sound / Beat the kette drum, and let us burn down Rome.’
67 Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, p. 82.
68 Bill Murphy, ‘“Reggae carries that heavy message of roots, culture, and reality. So the bass has to be heavy and the drums have to be steady”: An interview with Aston “Family Man” Barrett’, available at: {https://www.guitarworld.com/features/aston-family-man-barrett-interview}.
69 Maysels, ‘Dubbing the nation’, p. 99.
70 ‘Born Jamaican, here since slavery as an African.’
71 ‘Overs’’ is a concatenated version of the word ‘overstand’, a Rastafarian word roughly equivalent to ‘understand.’
72 W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘Opinion’, The Crisis Magazine, 27:2 (1923), p. 57.
73 Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary (Montreal: Pathfinder Press, 1970).
74 Smith et al., ‘The Rastafari movement in Kingston, Jamaica’, p. 20.
75 Verso Books, ‘Angela Davis on International Solidarity and the Future of Black Radicalism’, available at: {https://lithub.com/angela-davis-on-international-solidarity-and-the-future-of-black-radicalism/}; Angela Y. Davis, ‘Women and capitalism: Dialectics of oppression and liberation’, The Black Feminist Reader, ed. James, Joy and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Press, 2000), pp. 146–82; C. L. R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Chicago: PM Press, 2012); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
76 Marcus Garvey, Amy Jacques Garvey, and E. U. Essien-Udom, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, or, Africa for the Africans (New York, NY: Arno Press, 1967), p. 23.
77 James, A History of Pan-African Revolt, p. 97.
78 Rodney, The Groundings with my Brothers, p. 12.
79 Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary, p. 156.
80 ‘Mutabaruka interviews the Iconic Mortimer Planno. A cultural experience with Mutabaruka part 1’ (2023).
81 Lewis, Walter Rodney, p. 15.
82 Lewis, Walter Rodney, p. 35.
83 I Never Knew Tv, ‘Leroy ‘Horsemouth” Tells Crazy Story Of Getting Arrested During The Walter Rodney Riots In 1968 Pt.2’ (2021), available at: {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxvDlhA0fMg&ab_channel=INeverKnewTv}.
84 ‘They killed Walter Rodney / Let me tell you how it hurt me so badly / Because if one Black man comes to teach us the right way / They all get together and end his life / Right now, I’m vexed / Because they killed Malcolm X / They killed my prophet, Bob Marley / They killed my prophet, Marcus Garvey.’
85 Jah9, ‘Author interview in Kingston, Jamaica’ (2019).
86 Jason Gross, ‘Burning Spear interview: Perfect Sound Forever’, available at: {http://www.furious.com/perfect/burningspear.html}.
87 Dunn, ‘Never mind the bollocks’, p. 193.