Dark Visions, Brighter Futures: Black No More and the Retroactive Tradition of Race-Based Science Fiction

In the deep, dark basement of Black-No-More Incorporated, Max Disher cowers stark naked before a “horrible machine … [an] electric chair” (Schuyler 12-14); “wires and straps” restrain him, leaving his body to the mercy of scientists who force “revolting concoctions” down his throat (12-14). This is a science fiction (SF) scene straight from the pulp pages of magazines like Astounding and Amazing, as it renders high technology in the sensational yet clinical language of industry; one imagines hidden laboratories, mad scientists, zaps of electricity affecting processes of transformation. Yet it is also a scene from the pages of history, for Max Disher is black. He is a member of a race that knows full well what it is like to be stripped of bodily autonomy. This intersection of SF images and black racial concerns is the substance of what scholars call ‘Afrofuturism.’ Papers and websites variously cite George Schuyler’s Black No More as “the first full-fledged Afrofuturist novel” (Kim 23) or “Afrofuturist before such a term existed” (Senna 1). While the genre classification originated in the early 1990s, it has come to prominence in recent years due to the popularity of Marvel’s Black Panther, a film which envisions a high-tech African society untouched by the horrors of colonialism, combatting the traditionally rural and uneducated image of blackness (Broadnax 1). This is what comes to mind when one hears the term Afrofuturism: visions of an empowering black identity and a distinctly black future. Black No More is problematic in this regard for the same reason it is a part of the discussion at all. When Max Disher finally rises from his electric chair, ripping off the shackles that held him, he becomes Matthew Fisher: a white man. How can the “first full-fledged Afrofuturist novel” be one in which the black race disappears? If blackness no longer exists, is it truly a ‘black’ future? This essay argues that while the book uses technology wielded by and for black people, it does so only to deny the existence of black racial identity; while the book was written within the Harlem Renaissance (which shared the same goals as Afrofuturism), it is expressive of Schuyler’s politics against the New Negro Movement and its promotion of a universal black aesthetic; and while the book has clear pulp sensibilities, it was published outside the context of mainstream SF. Black No More may fit the Afrofuturist label, but by calling it an Afrofuturist work, one forces it into a literary context it was isolated from and in many ways opposed to.

To begin, it is important to establish a clear definition of the genre in the context of Black No More. In “Black to the Future,” Mark Dery first coins the term ‘Afrofuturism,’ which he describes generally as “African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” (Dery 180). By this he means any work that represents black lives and possible futures through the lens of technology. However, complications arise in that this definition is not merely confined to literature: it is broad to the point of encompassing all art, music, and film that takes black technoculture as its subject. It is an “aesthetic mode … projecting black futures derived from Afrodiasporic experiences” (Yaszek 42). The fact that Afrofuturism encompasses so many different forms of media necessitates that it be ambiguous on the particulars to not be too constraining: its identity is at once obvious and vague. As a result, the term means something different to everyone, and is liable to shift depending on the medium and context. It is thus no surprise that articles discussing Black Panther refer to Afrofuturism as wholly representative of the images and signs of that movie. In a Huffington Post article, Jamie Broadnax characterises Afrofuturism as an assertion of black identity and representation, a way of depicting black people “who are free and subservient to no one … leading the way in real or abstract futures” (Broadnax 1). This interpretation makes Afrofuturism intrinsic to visions of a positive future, the “intersection of sci-fi and African pride” (1). This is seen even in the article which coined the term. Dery’s interviewees—real black authors writing the works described by Afrofuturism—conceptualize these futures as “dreams of coherence in a fractured world” (Dery 185), a way of “knowing yourself as a black person—historically, spiritually and culturally” (210). The genre serves a real-world consolatory function, facilitating and affirming one’s understanding of black identity. Often this consolatory function takes the form of empowerment, especially across media. Dery cites, for example, Milestone Media’s Hardware, a comic in which a black scientist dons “forearm mounted cannons and a ‘smart’ battle-suit to wage guerilla war on his Orwellian, multinational employer” (182). The emphasis here is on power and restitution, a reimagining whereby technology is taken from those who have historically “brought [it] to bear upon black bodies” and instead used to service and venerate blackness (180).

By calling Black No More an Afrofuturist text, one implicitly connects it to every aspect of this positive vision and its two underlying premises: first, that there is a distinct black ‘race’ which transcends both place and demographic; and second, that this blackness should be embraced through a unified cultural aesthetic. The problem, however, is that the SF signification of Schuyler’s imagined future rejects these foundational premises. The book does not merely scrape away black identity as some statement on white oppression, but denies it was ever there to begin with. This is seen primarily through the character of Dr. Crookman—creator of Black-No-More—who argues that his conversion process works only because the supposed “contrast between Caucasian and Negro features” is nothing more than an “exaggeration” perpetuated by “the cartoonists and the minstrel men … literature and drama” (Schuyler 11). By this he suggests that the very concept of ‘race’ is merely a sociological construction perpetuated by racist media—that black faces, bodies and dialects do not reflect biological reality. This idea is debatable and would have been even more contentious at the time (especially given the prominence of fields like phrenology and craniometry), but Schuyler’s SF premise relies on it: in his view, one only needs to adjust the concentration of melanin in their skin to transcend the boundaries separating race. While this could be viewed as a suggestion for tolerance and equality—the idea that the ‘Negro’ race is just as human as everyone else—it is instead presented only as the necessary condition for their transition into white people. Crookman is “so interested in the continued progress of the American Negroes that he want[s] to remove all obstacles in their path by depriving them of their racial characteristics” (28). The sentiment implies that blackness is entirely superficial, and therefore not something to be proud of; it is not worth its social costs. This is entirely contrary to Broadnax and Dery’s concept of Afrofuturism as an expression of African pride. Where they argue that technology should be used to elevate blackness rather than devalue it, Schuyler seems to make ‘devaluing’ his goal.

This is further seen through Black No More’s use of speculative genealogical realities, as the grand revelation at the end of the novel is that all the despicable Anglo-Saxon characters are actually “descendants of colonial stock that came [to America] in bondage” (119). While clearly a part of Schuyler’s absurd satire, the general ambiguities around lineage and the erasure of black genealogical records in the time of slavery make it a conceivable possibility that many Americans who pass as Caucasian could have African ancestry. This disrupts the binary thinking of black versus white (especially in the context of the one-drop rule) by framing race in degrees: at what point does someone have enough African blood to make a claim to blackness? Where does black identity begin? The answer is not clear, but the question implies that it is not innate but rather something adopted, an affectation that can be worn. In the closing pages of the novel, Schuyler makes this literal: once Dr. Crookman reveals that those who undergo his procedure are in fact more white than those of pure Anglo-Saxon ancestry, “extreme whiteness [becomes] evidence of the possession of Negro blood” (149). As a result, Americans wear face powders named “Poudre Negre, Poudre le Egyptienne and L’Afrique,” effectively adopting black-face to counter any insinuation that they are black (150). Schuyler’s satirical masterstroke is to reverse colour entirely: everyone black is white, everyone white is black, and in this they are all equally terrible. While this final embrace of African culture seems positive on the surface, the reality is that by bottling and selling black racial identity in the same manner that whiteness was once commercialised, Schuyler suggests that black identity is equally worthy of worship—that is to say, not worthy at all. To return to Mark Dery’s foundational text, this is not a book that inspires “dreams of coherence in a fractured world” (Dery 185) but becomes more fractured as it goes on. While it is possible to view Dr. Crookman’s revelations as satirical in themselves, representative only of the character and not the author, Schuyler himself expresses similar ideas outside the text. In an essay written five years before the publication of Black No More, he argues against self-identity as it connects to race, writing that “Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country talk, think, and act about the same … the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon” (Leak 14). By voicing the same views so explicitly both within and outside the text, it is possible that Dr. Crookman acts as a sort of self-insert character for the author, as they are both engaged in the technological enterprise of Black-No-More: Crookman’s fictional sanitarium literally strips people of their blackness, while Schuyler’s novel acts as a metatextual machine disseminating the reader’s own conception of black identity.

As its title might imply, Afrofuturism is driven by the belief that there is a mode of expression unique to the African people; Schuyler’s aforementioned essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” is naturally dedicated to the opposite. If there is no true black identity, as Black No More suggests, the creations of black people cannot be attributed to their race. Schuyler instead aligns cultural production with class by suggesting that Southern ragtime is merely the “contributions of a caste in a certain section of the country,” entirely foreign to black people in the North, the Caribbean, and Africa itself – and therefore not characteristic of the Negro race as a whole; it is “merely coincidence that this peasant class happens to be of a darker hue (Leak 14). In this Schuyler suggests that black people cannot and should not take pride in ‘black creations,’ as they are not truly reflective of any black identity. This is relevant to Afrofuturism as it defines itself in part by the African diaspora, grouping its writers together across all the locales Schuyler lays out even though their people often live radically different lives. To place Black No More in the Afrofuturist category is therefore a paradox: Schuyler’s views on the impossibility of racial aesthetics are incompatible with the term’s organising principle. This same conflict was at the heart of the New Negro Movement (given its efforts to promote racial unity) such that Langston Hughes even replied to Schuyler’s essay, taking issue with Schuyler’s disassociation between race and art. He suggests that no one, regardless of place, can or should be separate from their blackness; anyone who wants to be called a plain “poet” rather than a “Negro poet” – to escape the ever-present double-consciousness of race and be defined by their work rather than their skin – is effectively asking to become a “white poet … as little Negro and as much American as possible” (Hughes 1). This is the same ‘us or them’ binary that Schuyler deconstructs through SF in Black No More through the gradual blurring of racial lines between black and white. It is possible, even likely, that with Black No More he was responding directly to this line of thought, positioning himself opposite the New Negro Movement (and by association Afrofuturism, as it shares this belief). Schuyler’s core objection lies in his belief that the notion of “Negro-Art” merely reinforces difference: “On this baseless premise … that the blackamoor is inferior and fundamentally different, is erected the postulate that … when he attempts to portray life through the medium of art, it must of necessity be a peculiar art” (Leak 16). Schuyler suggests that to promote a distinct black aesthetic is to promote the idea that black people are fundamentally different, thus playing into the same line of thinking which justified slavery and continues to motivate black oppression. By suggesting that one should be a “Negro poet” rather than a “poet,” one only cements their identity as an alien other. This confirms the idea that Schuyler’s attempt to deconstruct racial difference through Black No More is an attempt to dismiss the fundamental aesthetic premise at the heart of Afrofuturism.

Another complication of placing Black No More into Afrofuturism is that it implies an association with SF literature, placing the book into a continuum of works which truly began to take off in this period. This simply does not reflect reality. While the book contains the pulp sensibilities of the era’s SF, it was published as a physical novel. In his examination of the earliest works of black SF, famous author and critic Samuel R. Delany draws attention to Black No More’s “’30s pulp diction” as a way of highlighting this inconsistency. He writes: “Was this too much for the readers of Amazing and Astounding?” (Delany 1). One possible explanation is that it was a matter of audience and reception. Schuyler was writing a commentary and satire of black people specific to a time and place: Harlem in the 1930s. As much as the book is humorous and acerbic, one is supposed to read into its more serious racial implications. This would have been difficult in a pulp context, considering that most readers of Amazing and Astounding were white and accustomed to reading works with little thematic or metaphorical depth (Yaszek, “Race in Science Fiction” 4). As SF theorist Lisa Yaszek says, “black genre writers avoided the genre magazines because they looked so frivolous … [they were] meant to appeal to readers on a visceral level” (“Race in Science Fiction” 4-5). If Schuyler serialized Black No More through one of these magazines, it may have been trivialised and taken at face-value. For example, Delany’s reference to ‘30’s pulp diction is in the context of the novel’s ending, in which two white men in blackface are “stripped naked” and have their “ears and genitals cut off amid the fiendish cries of men and women” before being burned to death, “flames subsid[ing] to reveal a red-hot stake supporting two charred husks” (Schuyler 146-147). If published in the pulp space, there is a strong possibility that this scene would be appreciated for its violence in a visceral, indulgent way, rather than being read as a commentary on the arbitrary injustices of lynching. This is especially true given that pulp magazines also featured racist depictions of black people (Yaszek, “Race in Science Fiction” 5). It seems unlikely that such readers might empathise or appreciate the full nuances of the scene. This is not a slight against the intelligence of pulp magazine readers, but rather a statement about the type of content they would have been attuned to. Essentially, Schuyler’s more politicised writings lose meaning when placed within a pulp context. However, by doing the opposite—forcing pulp ideas into the space of black publishing—he is able to make a statement. At the time, there was an expectation among black genre writers to act as “agent[s] of social advancement within the uplift paradigm” by conforming to the dominant sensibilities of the Harlem Renaissance publishing space (Kim 67). As discussed previously, Schuyler did not believe in such paradigms. By including pulp SF magazine violence, vulgarity and elements of the fantastic in a physical novel dedicated to the lampooning of those most likely to buy that specific form of print media, he makes a statement against the kind of content that the Renaissance establishment expected writers to publish. By including pulp sensibilities, the form of his work becomes just as subversive as his satirical content.

While Black No More includes indisputable SF elements, they are functional in the same way that the book’s pulp sensibilities act as a device to advance Schuyler’s politics; there is little indication that they were knowingly conceived within the SF tradition. This is seen in that Schuyler’s acknowledgement of the text as SF is retrospective and tentative at best. In a 1973 interview, when encouraged to remark on Black No More’s status as an SF work, Schuyler said: “Yes, it was in the direction of most of the science fiction” (Leak 141). It is notable that Schuyler does not explicitly call Black No More a SF work, but rather “in the direction” of it, as if to say following parallel trends through its use of SF signification, but still apart in some way. Given that this interview took place towards the end of Schuyler’s life, his categorization of the work also seems retrospective: he is looking back on Black No More more than forty years after its publication, at a time when the SF genre was unambiguously established and popular across all demographics. However, the genre was still very much established in the 1930s; Schuyler’s inability to explain his intent or deliberately place his work in the SF of the period suggests he did not conceive of his work as SF at the time. It is also interesting that the interviewer directly compares the sanatorium scene which opens this essay to the paint-factory scene from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, published twenty years later. It is the same signification—both authors use a “science fiction type apparatus” to facilitate an operation in which the protagonist’s black identity is stripped away (Leak 141). Despite this, Ellison does not recognize the similarity in his introduction to the 30^th anniversary edition of Invisible Man (suggesting he had never read Schuyler’s work), and shows an even stronger reluctance to place himself in the SF tradition: “A piece of science fiction is the last thing I expected to write” (Yaszek, “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future” 41). This implies that he, like Schuyler, did not conceptualise himself as writing a speculative work—that the futuristic elements of the text were functional rather than deliberate expressions of black futurism. Ellison likewise writes his introduction towards the end of his life, implying that the SF association was also something suggested to him (evidently to his indignation) the same way it was proposed to Schuyler. They are all—interviewers and authors—engaging in the same retrospective process inherent to much of Afrofuturism; they are looking back and trying to catalogue works in ways that are not reflective of the reality in which they were written. While it is true that literary classifications are almost always retrospective, a way of acknowledging a new trend without any clear focus or name, both Black No More and Invisible Man were published during or directly before the golden age of science fiction: the genre existed in name, yet evidently the two authors considered themselves outside it. While it is true that disparate SF elements appear in several myths, epics and novels throughout history (for example, the works of Homer, Dante, Milton, and Shelly) many theorists do not place them within the SF genre as they did not begin a tradition or contribute to a wider speculative discourse (Freedman 253). While the term ‘science fiction’ was not widely circulated until after H.G. Wells had published his seminal novels at the turn of the 20^th century, he contributed to a popular lineage that can be traced to him through time (Evans 177). A more useful way to examine works like Frankenstein, for example, are to consider what the authors were responding to in their time. While the works of Ellison and Schuyler imagine speculative realties, the similarities between them do not seem to be the product of mutual influence, nor were they originally published within a SF discourse.

This is not to say that all black speculative works of this era do not deserve the title of ‘Afrofuturism.’ One sees the differences placing Black No More apart more clearly by examining the rest of Schuyler’s genre work. There is, for example, “Golden Gods,” a story which presages Black Panther’s Wakanda in its depiction of a “hidden, technologically advanced city” in Africa (Nevins 1). Similar concepts are seen in “Black Internationale” and “Black Empire,” two works in which Afrodiasporic blacks of all classes across the globe band together to “liberate Africa from its European colonial oppressors [and] create a utopia (Yaszek, “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future” 53). Schuyler published the story under a pseudonym as an exercise in “hokum” (recalling the Negro-art of writers like Langston Hughes), describing it during an interview as “hack work of the purest vein” designed to appeal to the “race chauvinism” of his audience (Littlewood 96). His comments illustrate how these works were meant to fit into the sensibilities of the New Negro Movement and its emphasis on racial pride, and how Black No More, by actively criticizing the idea of global black unity, was an equally deliberate attempt to position himself in opposition to such ideals. Regardless of Schuyler’s personal views, the texts are empowering in every way an Afrofuturist text is meant to be: the Black Internationale wields advanced technology to right the wrongs perpetuated by European hegemony (world hunger, racism, etc.) facilitating their evolution into Afrodiasporic “supermen and superwomen” (Yaszek, “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future” 54). Again, the similarities to the super-powered world of Black Panther are obvious. Even by their names, both works privilege a collective black identity; enact positive processes of black transformation; and debate the responsibility such groups might have to undo the damage of colonialism for black peoples across cultures. This is what an Afrofuturist text looks like in the popular imagination—a stark contrast to Black No More.

What is most interesting about Schuyler’s genre work is his choice of publication: like Black No More, these stories were essentially novellas, yet Schuyler chooses not to publish them book form, but instead serialize them in the Pittsburgh Courier (Yaszek, “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future” 53). While still a black newspaper rather than a pulp magazine, the medium’s ease of accessibility presumably made Schuyler’s work more widely available to those African-American readers who did not see themselves reflected in the high-brow literature of the New Negro Movement (irrespective of Schuyler’s intentions in doing so). This choice is even more poignant on a metatextual level, as it enacts Afrofuturism’s goal of imagining new futures. By serialising reports of black revolution alongside actual news bulletins, Schuyler suggests that his stories may become the news of the future. He imagines a world—a distinctly black world—and places it in the print-culture space people would read about it, if it came to pass. His use of a pseudonym in doing so also aligns him with all those possible “black, Hispanic, women, Native American, Asian” and other minority pulp writers who used the anonymity of the genre to give them creative freedom, or (as in Schuyler’s case) to avoid the pressures of a literary scene which looked down on SF genre sensibilities (Delany 1). Black No More is so subversive in its use of these tropes specifically because Schuyler took credit for them and published the novel within a movement to which it did not properly belong: the Harlem Renaissance. This meaning would be lost by retroactively shuffling the book back into a pulp SF context.

In the article that coins the phrase Afrofuturism, Samuel R. Delaney warns of the dangers and “interpretive idiocies” that arise when a book is “lifted out of its genre and cut loose from the tradition that precedes and produces it” (Dery 195). He refers specifically to William Gibson’s Neuromancer, a book which achieved literary success at the cost of being isolated from the SF lineage. Many scholars did not consider the themes and tropes it was responding to, and so meaning was lost. Taken in the context of Black No More, Delany’s claim affirms the idea that divorcing the novel from the tradition of the New Negro Movement would prevent it from speaking “loudest and most forcefully … clearest and most focused” (195). If critics continue to call the novel Afrofuturist, it sets a dangerous precedent, as it suggests that any piece of black speculative fiction should be placed in this category; that a single ‘drop’ of blackness should confine a black writer to bear the label of a sub-category of an already marginalized genre. This recalls the dialogue between Langston Hughes and Schuyler, with the latter arguing against a racial binary in the situation of a black writer wanting to be known simply as a “poet” rather than a “Negro poet” (Hughes). Afrofuturism, as it stands, denies this more nuanced possibility: it is a constant reminder of difference. Delany describes his own experience as a black SF writer in this way: “No one [in the genre] will ever look at you, read a word you write, or consider you in any situation … without saying to him- or herself (whether in an attempt to count it or to discount it), ‘Negro . . .’ The racial situation … is nevertheless your total surround” (Delany 1). If Afrofuturism continues to act as a blanket label for black SF, this will not change.

Ultimately, critical classification of Black No More as an Afrofuturist text is reductive, as the book is fundamentally opposed to the idea of a positive, unified black identity. While it includes SF elements, they were conceived of outside the SF publishing space only as reactionary tools to disrupt the prevailing opinions of the New Negro Movement. While the term is positive insofar as it creates interest in historically significant works which might otherwise be overlooked, the practice of looking back at disparate texts and forcing them together naturally prevents those texts from being read in their original contexts. It is a paradoxical, categorical trap that strips texts of their meaning. This is not unlike Dr. Crookman’s sanatorium: each work rediscovered by modern readers and labelled Afrofuturist assumes the role of Max Disher in his chair. Even though these texts stand to gain something by the process, they are each forever transformed—turned irrevocably into something they are not.

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