Black empire Book

I’ve got to get it out of the way and admit that I don’t really like this book. Admittedly, reading it as a “book” is the first step in distorting the narrative experience because this is a collection of columns that satirist George S. Schuyler published in the Pittsburgh Courier in the late 1930s under the pseudonym Samuel I. Brooks. He was dashing them off week after week, and the Courier audience was gobbling them up. To read a whole volume of them at once is to experience unrelentingly the repetitive plot devices, political dooms-saying, and appeals to shock value, which means, basically, that this gets boring, even though it seems like pulp science-fiction (done in a semi-parody) should be the most gobble-worthy scholarly reading on the planet.

And from the scholar’s vantagepoint, I want to say that the editors did a great job. This material is laid out in a readable, clear way, and they are very precise about the changes that they made for editorial consistency (choosing one spelling of a character’s name, etc.), and the inconsistencies that they kept in there to stay true to what Schuyler wrote (even if he sometimes didn’t stay true to what he had written in previous weeks—presumably he wrote in a headlong rush and never looked back). Also, their essay at the end, which examines his contradictory views about racial essentialism and race-as-a-construct, not to mention about back-to-Africa movements (Marcus Garvey) and black internationalism, and which presents important historical context (the Italian invasion of Ethiopia) and contemporaneous intertexts (pulp science fiction), is basically a model for the genre. They educate their reader and enrich their understanding of the text that came before, with thorough notes and a strong sense of Schuyler’s variegated periodical output. Also helpful for the scholar who wants to know Schuyler’s pseudonymous work but isn’t going to fall down the rabbit hole of the archives to do it, they present a list of his pieces written under this pseudonym for the Pittsburgh Courier, accompanied by pithy synopses.

The actual book (or, really, two books, as two narratives, Black Internationale and Black Empire were serialized in the Courier) is totally fascinating, even as I found it difficult to read in the long sitting in which I read it. Schuyler imagines an anti-hero, Dr. Belsidus, determined to right the wrongs that white people have done to black people over the centuries. He is charismatic, sexually irresistible (based on his ornately decorated love nests and the swooning response of women around her), brilliant, and ruthless. The book opens with our narrator, Slater, witnessing Dr. Belsidus murdering a white lover and then being kidnapped by Belsidus and his cronies, to serve as Belsidus’s personal secretary. In a dazzling case of Stockholm syndrome avant la lettre, Slater seems basically to forget that he was kidnapped and forced into service as he becomes an enthusiastic contributor to the schemes towards global domination undertaken by the Black Internationale, a group that kills all betrayers and dissolves their corpses in an acid bath (really).

Schuyler’s narrative alternates between utopian technological triumphalism (solar power, hydroponic farms, consumer cooperatives, cyclotrons that can conquer enemy airplanes) and international spy intrigue, punctuated by terrorist action. These wild swings in tone (from the technocrats’ hope for a better, more rational civilization to the bloodthirsty search for revenge and world domination) can be unsettling, as the latter is claimed as a way to the former. While Schuyler is critical of Mussolini, it is clear that the specter of fascism fascinated him and appealed to him, as Dr. Belsidus claims unlimited power, and all the sympathetic characters seem to agree that it is best for him to do so.

One of the most fascinating characters is Martha, Belsidus’s white lover, whom he dismisses as another pawn in his grand scheme but who becomes crucial in the plot that follows, particularly to foment conflict in Europe (in order to get the former imperial powers to ignore the Black Internationale’s take-over of Africa). Martha is just as ruthless as her lover, helping with the plot to gas 15,000 technicians for Britain’s munitions factories, shooting a white cop at close range, and assassinating the Prime Minister. But at the end of Black Empire, when Belsidus has experienced his greatest victories, Martha is left weeping, perhaps recognizing that she can never bridge the gap between them, his derisive view of white people. I couldn’t help but think about Schuyler’s white wife, Josephine, and how she might have felt about this dramatization of a white woman who is helping with the battle but who can never be recompensed by the full personal participation of Schuyler in their household and family. (I have her on my mind today, as I read a wonderful chapter about her in Carla Kaplan’s Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance.)

Also, it is so tricky to try to interpret Schuyler’s authorial positioning vis-à-vis the views in this book. This is always hard with Schuyler because he’s deliberately provocative (and later became an arch-conservative, so it’s tricky not to read back his later views onto his earlier views) and a satirist (hence, the reader is forced to play “where’s the irony?” or, perhaps harder, “where’s the sincerity?”). In this pseudonymous fiction, another level of uncertainty comes into play because Schuyler in print was totally dismissive and derisive of what he wrote as Samuel I. Brooks, claiming that he was deliberately playing into his audience’s “racial chauvinism.” At the same time, many of the ideas that he printed under his own name in political columns for the Pittsburgh Courier, show up in this book, particularly in the monologues of Dr. Belsidus.

I don’t like these books, but they are fascinating historical documents, in their longing for a black diasporic political unity, in their depiction of violent revenge against white institutions and individuals, in their flirtation with fascism and their embrace of technological utopianism.