Satirical Afrofuturism, Race, and Emotion in George S. Schuyler's Black No More

In arguably his most successful fictional work, Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933–1940, George S. Schuyler imagines a future America in which a Black physician develops a treatment that turns Black Americans ostensibly white by altering their skin color, hair, and features within a period of three days. The utopian premise of a Black-free world, however, only sets the scene for Schuyler's deeply satirical Afrofuturist imagination. Black No More—being "nothing less than a searing indictment of [the Harlem Renaissance's] philosophy of racial uplift" (Zamalin 69)—exemplifies Schuyler's controversial position among the Black literary and cultural elite of his time. Darryl Dickson-Carr reminds us that "Schuyler was for decades the most prominent, prolific, and talented journalist in African America," but that his move to far-right conservatism was "so out of step with the African American mainstream" that his literary works remained largely obscure and understudied (Spoofing 22). The iconoclasm and relentless critique of race in America that estranged him from the mainstream is, however, at the same time, integral to the estranging gaze of his Afrofuturism.¹ Danzy Senna notes that "Black No More resists the push toward preaching and the urge toward looking backward into history. Afrofuturist before such a term existed, it insists, instead, on peering forward into what could come to be" (xix). Schuyler's speculative satire questions the meaning of race and racism, but it also criticizes their very real effects. While it is true that Schuyler's political beliefs often put him at risk of neglecting the very real consequences of race and racism in American society, at least as far as Black No More is concerned, I disagree with Jeffrey A. Tucker's claim that Schuyler's conviction of the "emptiness of 'race' as a scientific signifier" makes him "ignore the role 'race' plays as a building block around which political and cultural identities are created" (147). Rather, my analysis of the novel aligns with that of Senna, who writes that Schuyler "saw how real race's influence was, and all the ways racialized thinking—that other opiate of the masses—limited and imprisoned both Black and white Americans" (xiv).

The beginning of the novel establishes a realist world which resembles the America of Schuyler's time and often also the America of today. Readers are transported to a society in which skin color determines social and economic privilege and Black individuals are routinely subjected to racism. Schuyler then estranges both his characters' and readers' expectations of race by making whiteness readily available for everyone in the storyworld. Readers follow the Black Harlemite Max Disher, who changes his name to Matthew Fisher after he takes the whitening treatment called "Black-No-More." Estranged from his past experiences of race, the protagonist recognizes its value as a profitable social construct. Schuyler's criticism of race as a capitalist weapon has been abundantly addressed in the existing scholarship on Black No More.² I suggest that the novel's satirical Afrofuturism not only offers an understanding of the relationship between race and capitalism, it also highlights the ways in which race and emotion intersect.

This essay argues that we come to understand the novel's critique of race as a signifier of difference through the presence of racialized emotions in the lives of virtually all of the novel's characters.³ The critical and satirical gaze of Schuyler's omniscient narrator alerts readers to the fact that there is no such thing as race, but that a racialized environment—even in the absence of skin color differences—inevitably shapes characters' individual emotions. Not only does Black No More invite readers to understand feelings of fear, anxiety, hope, anger, shame, and disgust as shaped by processes of racialization, but it also depicts these emotions as constitutive of race, racism, and, ultimately, racialized capitalism. Importantly, it does so both before and after the speculative whitening device estranges the world of the narrative for both the...