Black Nationalist Hokum: George Schuyler’s Transnational Critique

This essay reads George Schuyler’s transnational fantasies—Black Empire, Ethiopian Fictions, and Slaves Today—as a sustained critique and parody of the era’s pan-Africanism, especially of W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of black Zionism and Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement. In refusing to imagine a global black community linked by racial or political identification, Schuyler denaturalizes race and makes visible the blind spots of current transnational approaches which continue to make the same romantic assumptions about race as a global binding force that he undermined.