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50books_poc2009-03-07 05:20 pm
heyiya.livejournal.com) wrote in 50books_poc2009-03-07 05:20 pm
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(1) George S Schuyler, Black No More
This is my first review here. It got a bit long and involved... If anyone else has read this, I'd really love to talk about it!
Excerpted in Dark Matter, this book came to my attention through the way it’s cited as an early work of African American science fiction. It’s a dystopian satire, published in 1931, about the consequences of a scientific skin-color change procedure that can turn anyone white, and the subsequent eradication of blackness from America. The book is satirical of everyone, most bitingly black political organizers of the early 20th century and the mainstream political establishment; everyone is just out to make money and is utterly, comically individualistic and self-focused. The novel’s most powerful message is that the erasure of “race” would be neither the end of racism nor any other kind of utopia, and that makes me want to shove it under the nose of certain faux-naive participants in the racefail debates. Except that it’s a problematic enough book that I’m not entirely sure what impression they’d come away from it with. I’m not even sure what impression I came away from it with, although I’m glad I read it. I’m reading it with an eye to my academic work, so I’ve started to read around in the criticism of it: there seems to be a lot of disagreement about its politics and whether it’s assimilationist or not, which parts of it should or should not be taken seriously, etc.
One of the memes in RaceFail09 has been the distinction between representation and critique of racism, colonialism, stereotyping. This is a book that sits right in that uncomfortable zone in many ways, but I found its critiques to be pretty self-evident. The most racist ideologies are perpetuated by formerly black men who shore up the white ideologues who are too stupid to stand on their own in order to make money; white supremacy comes crashing down when a scientist researching racial ancestry discovers that nobody’s whiteness is pure, but then resurrects itself in inverted form after it’s discovered that the whitening procedure makes people paler than those born white, so everyone wants to prove their true whiteness by getting a tan. I read with a fairly constant sense of ‘I can’t believe he just SAID that!’ especially when I got to the satirical characterizations of WEB Du Bois and other black political leaders of the period; but there was stuff to chew on there, particularly (for this white academic) the mockery of academic investigators spending time and money figuring out the obvious. But I also laughed out loud at some of the depictions of mainstream US politics which felt rather contemporary. The climactic scene, disturbing to the point of sickening despite the fairly detached style, has the two leading lights of white supremacy getting lynched for their uncovered black ancestry by an all-white group that includes some formerly black men joining in enthusiastically to hide their discomfort.
Schuyler seems to be best known as a black conservative, but I found that Black No More satirizes conservatism just as much as it does radicalism; in fact, with its representation of opportunistic forces using the spectre of race to quell political protest, more. It has a lot of passages that are very celebratory of African American culture, which seemed to connect in to other writing of the Harlem Renaissance like Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, of which a couple of passages reminded me strongly. This edition of the book is published in the Modern Library Harlem Renaissance series, although according to the introduction Schuyler wasn’t keen to associate himself with that literary movement.
It’s pretty misogynistic, with women appearing only as objects of men’s desire and as the site of the problems of America’s racial future (they can’t stop giving birth to brown babies!). Women of color, with a couple of tiny exceptions, escape satirization by being totally absent. Miscegenation fears are totally central to the book and its satire, but gender is not. I felt desperately in need of a woman’s perspective, no matter how satirical, on this world; but I can neither locate nor imagine a woman writing something like this at this time, although I feel like I would like to reread Nella Larsen’s Passing in conjunction with it because it’s so much about passing on a larger, science-fictionalised scale.
While I'm here, I have a question. I am working on my dissertation prospectus and don't have a lot of time for fiction and other kinds of pleasure reading, alas, but my diss has a significant contingent about race, colonialism and the way they relate to science fiction, especially with reference to gender and sexuality, so I am learning a lot from academic books by POC at the moment. Would people be interested in reading reviews of texts like this and this?
Excerpted in Dark Matter, this book came to my attention through the way it’s cited as an early work of African American science fiction. It’s a dystopian satire, published in 1931, about the consequences of a scientific skin-color change procedure that can turn anyone white, and the subsequent eradication of blackness from America. The book is satirical of everyone, most bitingly black political organizers of the early 20th century and the mainstream political establishment; everyone is just out to make money and is utterly, comically individualistic and self-focused. The novel’s most powerful message is that the erasure of “race” would be neither the end of racism nor any other kind of utopia, and that makes me want to shove it under the nose of certain faux-naive participants in the racefail debates. Except that it’s a problematic enough book that I’m not entirely sure what impression they’d come away from it with. I’m not even sure what impression I came away from it with, although I’m glad I read it. I’m reading it with an eye to my academic work, so I’ve started to read around in the criticism of it: there seems to be a lot of disagreement about its politics and whether it’s assimilationist or not, which parts of it should or should not be taken seriously, etc.
One of the memes in RaceFail09 has been the distinction between representation and critique of racism, colonialism, stereotyping. This is a book that sits right in that uncomfortable zone in many ways, but I found its critiques to be pretty self-evident. The most racist ideologies are perpetuated by formerly black men who shore up the white ideologues who are too stupid to stand on their own in order to make money; white supremacy comes crashing down when a scientist researching racial ancestry discovers that nobody’s whiteness is pure, but then resurrects itself in inverted form after it’s discovered that the whitening procedure makes people paler than those born white, so everyone wants to prove their true whiteness by getting a tan. I read with a fairly constant sense of ‘I can’t believe he just SAID that!’ especially when I got to the satirical characterizations of WEB Du Bois and other black political leaders of the period; but there was stuff to chew on there, particularly (for this white academic) the mockery of academic investigators spending time and money figuring out the obvious. But I also laughed out loud at some of the depictions of mainstream US politics which felt rather contemporary. The climactic scene, disturbing to the point of sickening despite the fairly detached style, has the two leading lights of white supremacy getting lynched for their uncovered black ancestry by an all-white group that includes some formerly black men joining in enthusiastically to hide their discomfort.
Schuyler seems to be best known as a black conservative, but I found that Black No More satirizes conservatism just as much as it does radicalism; in fact, with its representation of opportunistic forces using the spectre of race to quell political protest, more. It has a lot of passages that are very celebratory of African American culture, which seemed to connect in to other writing of the Harlem Renaissance like Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, of which a couple of passages reminded me strongly. This edition of the book is published in the Modern Library Harlem Renaissance series, although according to the introduction Schuyler wasn’t keen to associate himself with that literary movement.
It’s pretty misogynistic, with women appearing only as objects of men’s desire and as the site of the problems of America’s racial future (they can’t stop giving birth to brown babies!). Women of color, with a couple of tiny exceptions, escape satirization by being totally absent. Miscegenation fears are totally central to the book and its satire, but gender is not. I felt desperately in need of a woman’s perspective, no matter how satirical, on this world; but I can neither locate nor imagine a woman writing something like this at this time, although I feel like I would like to reread Nella Larsen’s Passing in conjunction with it because it’s so much about passing on a larger, science-fictionalised scale.
While I'm here, I have a question. I am working on my dissertation prospectus and don't have a lot of time for fiction and other kinds of pleasure reading, alas, but my diss has a significant contingent about race, colonialism and the way they relate to science fiction, especially with reference to gender and sexuality, so I am learning a lot from academic books by POC at the moment. Would people be interested in reading reviews of texts like this and this?