Black Empire. - book reviews

African American Review, Winter, 1993 by John C. Gruesser

Ed. Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1991. 348 pp. $24.95 hardcover; $14.95 paperback.

I knew it was hokum. I knew Binks had rigged up this robot and I knew approximately just how it worked, and yet for the life of me I could not but enter into the spirit of the thing and obey the commands of the voice. (Black Empire 61)

The 1991 publication of Black Empire may very well have the effect of rescuing George S. Schuyler from unwarranted obscurity and forcing critics to come to grips with this complex writer whose career stretched from the 1920s to the 1970s. The book comprises two novels by Schuyler (using the pseudonym Samuel I. Brooks) that originally appeared serially in the Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1938.(1) Part of Northeastern University Press's Library of Black Literature series, Black Empire makes available to scholars and the general public two virtually unknown literary works about a successful African American-led conspiracy to liberate Africa from the European colonial powers and establish a black empire that will unify the continent. Moreover, it contains a sixty-five-page afterword on Schuyler and the significance of the novels written by the volume's editors, Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen, as well as an annotated bibliography of Schuyler's fiction written for the Courier between 1933 and 1939 under a variety of pen names. This combination of previously unavailable texts and new information, coupled with a recent New York Times Book Review essay about the writer and the Black Empire novels by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., almost guarantees an imminent critical rediscovery of the author.

Gates's |A Fragmented Man: George Schuyler and the Claims of Race' offers an insightful and largely persuasive reading of the author and his work that will certainly be the jumping off point for future interpretations of Schuyler's corpus. However, while I believe that Gates has correctly recognized and ingeniously accounted for Schuyler's complexity, his reading of the writer as a literary schizophrenic who created a conservative public persona for himself while expressing extreme leftist views through the pseudonymous Samuel I. Brooks does not completely mesh with the facts. I would like to review the major critical responses to Schuyler, make some observations about the writer's career and the Black Empire novels that problematize Gates's reading, and in closing offer a new interpretation of Schuyler and his work, one that compares him to his most famous character, Max Disher, the chameleon-like protagonist of Black No More. Instead of a schizophrenic, I view Schuyler as a skillful role player, who, early in his career at least, was able successfully to negotiate the daunting social, political, and psychic pressures facing an independent black writer by creating an array of masks for himself.

Before the publication of Black Empire, critical attention devoted to Schuyler consisted of brief discussions of the author in critical surveys of African American literature, a handful of articles on and interviews with the writer, and a Twayne series book by Michael Peplow. Given not only the popularity Schuyler enjoyed in his four decades as an outspoken journalist, critic, and editorial writer for the largest black weekly newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, but also his unprecedented access to mainstream publications, such as H. L. Mencken's American Mercury, the dearth of critical interest in Schuyler prior to 1991 is striking, though not wholly inexplicable. It may result in part from the fact that he published only three literary works in book form during his lifetime: His best known creation, the hilarious and trenchant satire of white and black race chauvinism Black No More (1931); an early African American fictional depiction of Africa based on his own newspaper articles about slavery in contemporary Liberia, Slaves Today (1931); and his staunchly anti-communist autobiography Black and Conservative (1966). Moreover, Schuyler's frequent role as a gadfly within the African American intellectual community has probably contributed to his relative obscurity today. He has been rather simplistically labeled an "assimilationist" by critics who have seized upon his assertion that "the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon" in perhaps his best known essay, "The Negro-Art Hokum" (662).(2) Others may have deliberately ignored Schuyler because of his politically incorrect criticism of the Civil Rights Movement.

The major debate in Schuyler criticism has focused less on the substance than on the consistency or inconsistency of the writer's published works. In Black and Conservative, Schuyler himself was among the first to assert a single theme underlying all his writings: His exposure of the Communist conspiracy and the threat it posed to Americans in general and African Americans in particular. Although few accept this reductive view of Schuyler's oeuvre, it has certainly influenced critics because the autobiography is such a valuable source of information about the author. In 1974 Arthur Davis argued for a different thread connecting Schuyler's works: "The assumption of the Negro's essential American-ness undergirds all his published works" (104). Michael Peplow likewise finds Schuyler consistent, however not as an "assimilationist" but as a lonely iconoclast who once declared, "I have always said and written just what I thought without apologies to anyone, and I intend to continue doing so.... I have always been more concerned with being true to myself than to any group or groups" (qtd. in Black and Conservative 223).