Schuyler

Prior to the discovery and republication in 1991 of George S. Schuyler’s serials “The Black Internationale” and “Black Empire,” his fiction was thought to be limited to the 1931 satire Black No More. ¹ The linking of Schuyler to multiple pseudonyms revealed a large new body of popular serial fiction he wrote during the 1930s. ² “The Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius Against the World” and its sequel “Black Empire: An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modern Africa” are two such serials Schuyler, using the pseudonym Samuel I. Brooks, contributed to the popular black weekly the Pittsburgh Courier between 1936 and 1938. ³ In “A Fragmented Man: George S. Schuyler and the Claims of Race,” a 1992 New York Times Book Review, Henry Louis Gates Jr. used these newly discovered texts as a vehicle to reexamine Schuyler and his widely-fluctuating literary reputation. Gates begins his article by quoting some of Schuyler’s most controversial statements critiquing Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement and Malcolm X (31). After a review of Schuyler’s two science fiction serials, Gates returns to the controversy surrounding Schuyler within the African-American community and asserts that “[i]f George Schuyler’s place as a major figure in black letters has not been fully acknowledged, it is in part because his conception of the intellectual’s role has never fully been appreciated” (43). For Schuyler, “skepticism, independent critical thinking and iconoclasm were part and parcel of the intellectual’s calling, and […] ‘race loyalty’ depended on just these qualities of mind” (ibid). While Gates does not excuse or elide Schuyler’s extremely conservative viewpoints, especially later in life, he does place Schuyler squarely in the context of “the pressures of ideological conformity among blacks” (ibid). As the subtitle of Gates’ article emphasizes, Schuyler has been and continues to be treated popularly 54and critically largely in terms of “the claims of race,” judged according to his “race loyalty,” or lack thereof (43). Furthermore, Gates claims that the evaluative criteria of “race loyalty” “haunts the lives of African-American intellectuals and public figures” more broadly (ibid). Gates seems to see hope in a “new generation of black intellectuals who are more likely than their forebears to recognize in the productive clash and contest of perspectives a source of strength” (ibid).