Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-v5vhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-14T08:32:31.219Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Black No More: George Schuyler and Racial Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Sonnet H. Retman
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

As Schuyler's story hones in on market-driven formulations of identity, it speaks to fantasies and anxieties about increasing urban industrialization, racial assimilation, and the reproduction of raced bodies in the black modernist moment. Tracing the manufacture, promotion, and regulation of race in the novel, I argue that Black No More illuminates new market possibilities for the trade of racial property in commodity form during the Fordist era. In this way, Schuyler's narrative offers a complex and prescient understanding of racial capitalism in the interwar period, one that portends our contemporary negotiations with mass-mediated identity and consumer culture on a global scale.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 5: Special Topic Comparative Racialization , October 2008 , pp. 1448 - 1464
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Blum, Edward J. W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bolnick, Deborah Weiss. “Showing Who They Really Are”: Commercial Ventures in Genetic Genealogy. Amer. Anthropological Assn. Annual Meeting. 22 Nov. 2003. 14 Dec. 2006 <http://shrn.stanford.edu/workshops/revisitingrace/Bolnick2003.doc>..>Google Scholar
Bone, Robert. The Negro Novelist in America. New Haven: Yale UP, 1968.Google Scholar
Brooks, Daphne A. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carby, Hazel V. Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America. New York: Verso, 1999.Google Scholar
Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Chude-Sokei, Louis. The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Cross, Gary. An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America. New York: Columbia UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front. New York: Verso, 1997.Google Scholar
Dickson-Carr, Darryl. African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001.Google Scholar
Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991.Google Scholar
Faulkner, Howard J. “A Vanishing Race.” CLA Journal 37 (1994): 284–87.Google Scholar
Favor, J. Martin. “Color, Culture, and the Nature of Race: George S. Schuyler's Black No More.” Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. 111–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Jeffrey B. The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaines, Kevin K. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and McKay, Nellie, eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2004.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. “Modern Tones.” Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Powell, Richard J. and Bailey, David A. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 102–09.Google Scholar
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. Who Set You Flowin'? The African-American Migration Narrative. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hale, Grace. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940. New York: Pantheon, 1998.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart. “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.” Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism. Paris: UNESCO, 1980. 305–45.Google Scholar
Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review June 1993: 1707–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, Trudier. Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya A. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Haslam, Jason. “‘The Open Sesame of a Pork-Colored Skin’: Whiteness and Privilege in Black No More.” Modern Language Studies 32 (2002): 15–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980.Google Scholar
Holt, Thomas C. The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.Google Scholar
Huggins, Nathan. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. 1940. 2nd ed. New York: Hill, 1993.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” 1926. Gates and McKay 1311–14.Google Scholar
Johnson, Charles S. “The New Frontage on American Life.” 1925. The New Negro. Ed. Locke, Alaine. New York: Atheneum, 1968. 278–98.Google Scholar
Joseph, Ralina L. “ ‘Not by This Outside:‘ Selling Post-Race on America's Next Top Model.” American Quarterly, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Jane, Kuenz. “American Racial Discourse, 1900–1930: Schuyler's Black No More.” Novel 30.2 (1997): 170–92.Google Scholar
Larson, Charles A. Introduction. Black No More. By George Schuyler. New York: Collier, 1971. ix–xx.Google Scholar
Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Penguin, 1997.Google Scholar
Lippman, Abby. “Prenatal Genetic Testing and Screening: Constructing Needs and Reinforcing Inequities.” American Journal of Law and Medicine 17 (1991): 15–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Locke, Alain. “The New Negro.” The New Negro. Ed. Locke. 1925. New York: Atheneum, 1968. 3–16.Google Scholar
Lopez, Ian F. Haney. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Martin, Charles D. The White African American Body: A Cultural and Literary Exploration. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Mills, Joseph. “Absurdity of America in Schuyler's Black No More.” EnterText 1.1 (2000): 127–48. 25 Apr. 2008 <http://arts.brunel.ac.uk/gate/entertext/Mills.pdf>.Google Scholar
Morgan, Stacey. “‘The Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science’: Race Science and Essentialism in George Schuyler's Black No More.” CLA Journal 42 (1999): 331–52.Google Scholar
Mullen, Harryette. “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness.” Diacritics 24.2–3 (1994): 71–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nakamura, Lisa. “Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet.” The Cybercultures Reader. Ed. Bell, David M. and Kennedy, Barbara M. London: Routledge, 2000. 712–20.Google Scholar
Nash, Catherine. “‘Recreational Genetics,‘ Race and Relatedness.” Trans. François Fournier. L'observatoire de la génétique 24 (2005). 14 Dec. 2006 <http://www.ircm.qc.ca/bioethique/obsgenetique/>. Path: Archives; 2005; “Recreational Genetics.”Google Scholar
North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Official Language of the Racial Privacy Initiative. Adversity.net. 25 Apr. 2008 <http://www.adversity.net/RPI/rpi_mainframe.htm>..>Google Scholar
Patterson, Orlando. “Race Over.” New Republic 10 Jan. 2000: 6.Google Scholar
Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Peplow, Michael W. George Schuyler. Boston: Twayne, 1980.Google Scholar
Peplow, Michael W. “George Schuyler, Satirist: Rhetorical Devices in Black No More.” CLA Journal 18 (1974): 242–57.Google Scholar
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume 1:1902–1941 I, Too, Sing America. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Rayson, Ann. “George Schuyler: Paradox among ‘Assimilationist’ Writers.” Black American Literature Forum 12 (1978): 102–06.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Dorothy E. “Race and the New Reproduction.” Hastings Law Journal 47 (1995–96): 935–50.Google Scholar
Robinson, Amy. “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest.” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 715–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ryan, Suzanne C. “New FX Series Has Families Trading Races.” Boston Globe 4 Mar. 2006. 30 Apr. 2008 <http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2006/03/04/new_fx_series_has_families_trading_races/?page=1>..>Google Scholar
Schuyler, George. Black and Conservative: The Autobiography of George S. Schuyler. New Rochelle: Arlington, 1966.Google Scholar
Schuyler, George. Black No More. 1931. New York: Modern Lib., 1999.Google Scholar
Schuyler, George. “The Negro-Art Hokum.” 1926. Gates and McKay 1221–22.Google Scholar
Scruggs, Charles. The Sage in Harlem: H. L. Mencken and the Black Writers of the 1920s. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.Google Scholar
Smith, Valerie. “Authenticity in Narratives of the Black Middle Class.” Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings. New York: Routledge, 1998. 63–86.Google ScholarPubMed
Smith, Valerie. “Class and Gender in Narratives of Passing.” Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings. New York: Routledge, 1998. 35–62.Google ScholarPubMed
Smith, Valerie. “Reading the Intersection of Race and Gender in Narratives of Passing.” Diacritics 24.2–3 (1994): 43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tucker, Jeffrey A. “‘Can Science Succeed Where the Civil War Failed?‘: George S. Schuyler and Race.” Race Consciousness: African American Studies for the New Century. Ed. Fossett, Judith Jackson and Tucker, . New York: New York UP, 1997. 136–53.Google Scholar
Weems, Robert. Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century. New York: New York UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Weinbaum, Alys. “Racial Aura: Walter Benjamin and the Work of Art in a Biotechnological Age.” Literature and Medicine 26.1 (2007): 207–39.Google Scholar
Weinbaum, Alys. Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wintz, Cary, ed. The Harlem Renaissance, 1920–40 (Series No. 1–5). New York: Garland, 1996.Google Scholar
Zackodnik, Teresa. “Fixing the Color Line: The Mulatto, Southern Courts, and Racial Identity.” American Quarterly 53 (2001): 420–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar