ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the worldmaking practices of international law and literature, and argues that when it came to the establishment of the White World order – constituted by ‘modern international law’ and consecrated in the League of Nations in 1919 – these two worldmaking practices were not just entangled, they were inseparable. It shows how the worldmaking, and unmaking, practices of John Buchan’s A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906) and W. E. B. Du Bois’ Dark Princess: A Romance (1928) track – both historically and theoretically – those of international law. While Buchan’s A Lodge in the Wilderness illustrates how international lawyers can read fictional worlds ‘historically’, for how novels ‘inscribe’ the contexts in which they were produced, Du Bois’ Dark Princess shows how novels might be read for their ‘subversive mappings’ of the world, their ‘alternative clocks and maps’ (in Charles Mills terms) that might re-orient or demystify the ‘white world’ (juridico-political, social and epistemological) that international law (still) takes for granted.
