Keywords

In his 1925 essay, ‘The negro mind reaches out’, W.E.B. Du Bois reflects on one of his earlier pronouncements:

in my younger years and in the dawn of this century I wrote: ‘the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line’. It was a pert and singing phrase which I then liked and which since I have often rehearsed to my soul and asked:—how far is this prophecy or speculation? …. Fruit of the bitter rivalries of economic imperialism, the roots of the catastrophe were in Africa deeply entwined at bottom with the problems of the color line. And of the legacy left … world dissension and catastrophe still lurk in the unsolved problems of race relations. What then is the world view that the consideration of this question offers? (Du Bois 1992, p. 385)

Writing almost thirty years since his statement about the colour line made its way into print, Du Bois’s statement is notable for a number of reasons, not least of which is his astute reading of geopolitics. Nevertheless, his continuous ‘rehearsal’ of the statement is compelling here partly for the registers on which his musings occur. Was he, as he wonders, operating in the prophetic or the speculative? What he appears to find is that he was operating on a plane in which the two commingle—that the divide between the prophecy and speculation might not have been as far apart as he had thought. In other words, what he finds out was that not only was he correct about the colour line, but that he was not at the time aware of how correct he was. And so, the problem of the twentieth century is not, as it may have seemed in the souls of black folk (a text whose concerns were arguably focused on the United States), primarily a national problem, but one that was not contained by national borders, and whose reflections and repercussions could be found across the globe.

Du Bois’s engagement in internationalist analysis intensified and continued throughout the remainder of his career, but three years after the publication of ‘The negro mind reaches out’ (1925) in Alain Locke’s The new negro (1925), Du Bois published Dark princess (1928), a novel of internationalist envisioning that he would later call his favourite work. Almost a decade later, George Schuyler, who reputedly greatly admired Du Bois’s novel, would provide his own contribution to speculative internationalist fiction with two related and connected newspaper serials entitled ‘The Black Internationale’ and ‘Black Empire’.1 If Du Bois was inordinately fond of Dark princess, Schuyler took a somewhat different approach regarding his serial novel, at one point proclaiming it ‘hokum and hack work of the purest vein’ (quoted in Hill and Rasmussen 1991, p. 260). We could easily attribute their divergent reactions to their own speculative works, on one level, and to differences in personality and outlook. Schuyler is often viewed as the cynical, pessimistic misanthrope; Du Bois in turn is the idealist, optimist humanist. What this obscures, however, is the way in which both novels work within the poetic space existing amidst prophecy and speculation and in doing so rely upon utopian logics as central to their work.

It is the mark of something disconcerting that ‘utopia’ has taken on a negative cast. On the one hand there is the increasingly fashionable association of ‘utopian’ with ‘foolish’, painted with the same brush that has defaced the word ‘idealistic’. Further down that line of reasoning, we find the continued disparagement of the term through its readily assumed consonance with those figures whom Jay Winter refers to as ‘major utopians’ of the twentieth century, those who ‘murdered millions in their attempts to transform the world’ (Winter 2006, p. 1). Although Winter does not subsequently call for the rejection of the entire concept of utopia, he is compelled to differentiate between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ utopias in order to reclaim the term from those who consider ‘despair and hatred [to be] the emotions involved in utopian thought’ (Ruth Levitas 2003, p. 3). Debasements of the concept have proved metonymic for the general perception of utopian thought with the result that finally, as Ruth Levitas succinctly argues:

The idea of utopia implicit in most lay usage of the term is of a perfect society which is impossible and unattainable. It is either an idle dream, or, if attempts are made to create that society, a dangerous illusion. Thomas More’s original pun—eutopos/outopic combined as utopia, hence the good place which is no place—is transformed into the good place which can be no place, and which, in seeking a place, becomes its opposite, dystopia. (p. 3)

While it may seem from More’s original homonymic pun that the success or failure of a utopian project hinges on place, there is as potent a deployment of utopia for which the anticipatory function is preeminent. Through a discussion of Frederic Jameson’s work on utopia, Ian Buchanan argues for reading utopia as an utterance that performs the ‘act of promising’ in measuring the world that already is against imagining the better world that we want to be:

When you promise something you create an expectation, but do not fulfil it—except at the cost of extinguishing the promise itself, and that is their whole point. The promise thus holds its endpoint (which cannot—of course—be experienced in the act of promising itself) in front of us right from the outset and calls on us to acquit it, to make it happen, as it were, and vanishes in the instant we do … Utopia, I want to suggest, takes the form of a promise, or better a promising-machine. In this way we are able to say what it is by telling what it does, thus relieving ourselves of the burden of having to describe its peculiarly unpresentable content … Utopia is to us the promise of a better future. (Buchanan 1988, pp. 22–23)

Both Du Bois and Schuyler create their literary utopias as visions and promises of alternatives, imagining the possibility not only of a society free of the constraints of white supremacy, but a world that allows for talent and merit irrespective of race and ethnicity to take their natural position as the crème de la crème, rising to the top.

I submit that what we find in Dark princess and Black empire are attempts to accept a project that is intimately familiar with the poetics of speculative prophecy driven by the dynamics of utopia. Both novels illustrate a type of racial utopian vision for the future in which a transformed global polity emerges. The utopian projects—through a romantic millenarianism for Du Bois and a melodramatic technocratic messianism for Schuyler (as both messianism and millenarianism are symptoms of the utopian impulse)—nonetheless engender some uneasiness about the final character and directions of the imagined utopia. I will offer some thoughts on the matter by way of an exploration of how Du Bois’s Dark princess and Schuyler’s Black empire engage the often uneasy relationship between the utopian possible and the more constrictive, anti-utopian probable. By examining the ways that Du Bois and Schuyler make use of the utopian in their novels, I will explore how the trajectories of possibility in the two novels provide insights into the politics and poetics of their speculative writing.

Messengers and Messiah: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess

Early in Du Bois’s Dark princess, the titular character self-assuredly proclaims that ‘Pan Africa belongs logically with Pan-Asia’.2 Du Bois purports in this 1928 novel to imagine a utopian dream of solidarity among the darker peoples of the world. Alternating Dark princess between literary realism and a romantic millenarianism that proclaims a politics of black global solidarity, Du Bois reconfigures the ‘color line’, which he famously cast 30-odd years prior as the looming national problem of the upcoming century, as a global problem. The novel is by turns vague and excessive and can with some justice be seen as an ideological disquisition cloaked in the trappings of a melodramatic romance plot. Nonetheless, although the utopian vision is actually never realized within the novel, Du Bois’s work is charged with and animated by the problem of utopia. The novel centres around one Matthew Towns, a brilliant black medical student who casts aside his medical training in disgust when he is not allowed to take a required course in obstetrics because of racism. Throwing his credentials (literally) in the face of the dean, he exiles himself to Berlin. While stewing in his rage at a café, he comes to the aid of a ‘radiantly beautiful’ and ‘colored’ woman who is attempting to fend off the rapacious sexual advances of a brash white man from the United States. The woman turns out to be the Princess Kautilya of Bwodpur, India. After she hears why Towns is in Berlin, she takes him to a multinational gathering representing the ‘darker peoples of the world’ at which machinations have begun for anti-imperialist and anti-white supremacist realignments of global power (DP, p. 302). In Dark princess, Du Bois reimagines the colour line not only as a future political entity but also as an already-existing pan-historical cultural geography in which the prevailing hegemony of the white world is exposed as powerful nonsense by the representatives of the Council of the Darker Races:

We are agreed that …. the darker peoples are the best—the natural aristocracy, the makers of art, religion, philosophy, life, everything except brazen machines … because of the longer rule of natural aristocracy among us. We count our millenniums of history where Europe counts her centuries. We have our own carefully thought-out philosophy and civilization, while Europe has sought to adopt an ill-fitting me´lange of the cultures of the world. (DP, p. 25)

Du Bois accepts this as a chance to educate his main character, and not incidentally, his reading audience. The character Matthew is an educated and accomplished African-American, who, having experienced the global reach of racism, is still stunned by the possibility of a global organization existing in opposition to white superpowers.

Matthew’s first point of connection with the tenebrous Council, however, is through the exoticized Indian princess of the title. Although Matthew has already noticed her beauty and her colour, his fury in the cafe´ is stoked when he overhears the white American brag of the certainty of his sexual conquest of this woman by insisting: ‘I know niggers, and I don’t mean perhaps. Ain’t I white’ (DP, p. 9). Du Bois, who has already had Matthew muse that this woman ‘in some sense must be royal’ even before the truth of her identity is revealed to him, offers here evidence illustrating the logics of the connection of Pan-Africa and Pan-Asia (DP, p. 8). The ‘exile’ of the section title of the novel is meant, in an apparent sense, to indicate Matthew’s physical removal to Berlin after leaving medical school. But as Du Bois writes it, the space created through the transformation of the royal and the meritorious through the epithet ‘nigger’ is the space of banishment. The dean is able to readily ignore all of Matthew’s awards and commendations by sweeping them—and by adjunction Matthew—into non-existence by asking rhetorically (but for it, no less brutally): ‘Do you think white women patients are going to have a nigger doctor delivering their babies?’ (DP, p. 4). The white American is able to banish Kautilya’s obvious regality with similar fluency.

In the confluence of these jarring moments separated by only a few pages in the novel, a new geography is created through the invocation of the insults, and it is in this space that a feeling of community emerges. Although ‘[it] is dominating Europe which has flung this challenge of the color line’ and rendered it unavoidable, Du Bois redraws the colour line here as he does in ‘The negro mind reaches out’ (DP, p. 21). That the members of this worldwide council, who converse effortlessly about classical and avant-garde culture while gliding through different tongues, are viewed as inferior to a shop-keeper’s racist progeny is regarded akin to a perversion of natural order. Assumption of hierarchy, ownership, control, and immediate dismissal based on physical appearance bond together all the members of the Council and they drive the utopian response of this community to restore the balance. New geographies formed by the transnational nature of racism compel new spaces within which to combat them.

While united against global white domination, the members of the Council of the Darker Races are nevertheless reluctant to accept the possibility that Africans and African Americans can participate in their movement; that is, as one of the members acknowledges, ‘there is a deeper question—that of the ability, qualifications, and real possibilities of the black race in Africa or elsewhere’ (DP, p. 21). Many members of the Council do not believe that African Americans—described as ‘these former slaves’—is ready for cooperation and action, nor, without a proper history of ‘natural aristocracy’ that it has anything to offer culturally. Indeed, in the presence of the cultured aristocracy of the world, who possess and easily perform ‘culture, wealth, beauty … [and] power’, Matthew ‘feels his lack of culture audible, and not simply of his own culture, but of all the culture in white America which he had unconsciously and foolishly, as he now realized, made his norm’ (DP, p. 24). Undeterred, Matthew makes a forceful argument for a democratic vision, arguing for possibility and faith in the capacity of the lowly and the common, which he demonstrates by calling upon his own cultural audibility, mesmerizing the group with a rendition of the spiritual, ‘Go down, Moses’. Although some remain unconvinced, his passion convinces the princess, who consequently charges him to go back to the United States in order to assess the readiness of black Americans to revolt in alliance with the worldwide council. Matthew sends reports back to the princess on what he observes throughout the nation, as he is now working as a Pullman Porter. He makes contact with the leading figure in the black revolutionary effort, Manuel Perigua, who turns out to be less than capable or stable. Despondent after assuming the princess has forsaken him, Matthew goes along with Perigua’s plan to blow up a special Ku Klux Klan train. Additionally, in order to martyr himself for the revolutionary cause, Matthew plans to be on board. But when he finds the princess has ended up on the train, he stops the train, saving it from destruction.

Towns refuses to give Perigua (who has died trying to set the dynamite) up to the police and consequently goes to jail for obstructing justice. He is eventually freed and enters Chicago politics. Chicago proves to be a sort of soul-crushing purgatory for Matthew, and after the reappearance of the princess to save him from the final destruction of his principles and potential, they are once again separated. When Matthew is just about to give up hope, she summons him to his mother’s house in Virginia where, unbeknownst to Matthew, Kautilya has gone to give birth to their son. In a rather intense dyad of pageants—the first rooted in African-American religious ritual, the second an Indian turn on the visit of the Magi to the newborn Christ child—the novel ends as the son of Matthew and Kautilya is proclaimed, ‘King of the Snows of Gaurisankar!’, ‘Protector of Ganga the Holy!’, ‘Incarnate Son of the Buddha!’, ‘Grand Mughal of Utter India!’, ‘Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds!’ (DP, p. 311).

What is crucial in reading Dark princess as a utopian work is to recognize that the utopia is almost literally gestational. It is imagined throughout the novel in elusive, ethereal language as a ‘global South’ in which the land of the southern United States, Latin America, Africa, and Asia are consolidated by a merging of the fertile, long-suffering black US South and a romanticized India: ‘here in Virginia you are at the edge of a black world. The Black Belt of the Congo, the Nile, and the Ganges reaches by way of Guiana, Haiti and Jamaica … thus I see a mighty synthesis: you can work in Africa and Asia right here in America if you work in the Black Belt’ (DP, p. 286). But this mighty synthesis through this utopian coupling becomes finally literalized only at the very end of the novel with the birth of Matthew Towns’s and Princess Kautilya’s son, heralded as the ‘Messiah to all the Darker Peoples!’ and physically described only as a ‘palpitating bubble of gold’ (DP, p. 307).

Du Bois’s idealization of the ‘logical’ union between Pan-Africa and Pan-Asia—a symbolic political union against global white supremacy—is now made actual through eugenic means. Not only is an international and interracial union achieved through the birth of this child, who, as Kenneth Warren points out, is descended from both slavery and royalty, thus ‘signal[ing] Du Bois’s conviction that the world could find what it needed only by seeking leaders from among the downtrodden as well as the exalted’ (Warren 2000, p. 169). Supposedly, in the very mixing of the blood of royal, ancient India and the promise embodied in long-suffering African America, we receive a promissory note for a better future. Yet even then, we are to greet the ‘messiah of the darker peoples’ as we must all messiahs—with an anticipatory, yet assured faith. And so, Du Bois’s novel ends gestation with germination.3 Ian Buchanan connects the nature of utopian promise to that of seeds: ‘That we do not know which of them will flourish, and which of them will perish, is precisely the nature of any promise, for who can tell which of the many promises in which we are all imbricated will be made good and which will be left to wither and die. And it is precisely this lack of certainty which makes them Utopian, for it is what keeps the seeds open to the future, open to new possibilities’ (Buchanan 1988, p. 23). For the novel ends with the child’s birth and his heralding, offering the promise of the utopia rather than any description of it. That, following Buchanan, makes it utopian in the end.

The fulfilment of the romantic, domestic plot ultimately allows Du Bois to avoid the difficulties of representing the utopian state. But perhaps that description is unneeded for Du Bois’s utopic world as what seems to matter here is feeling. So does Du Bois rely on affective means to represent the connections within the coloured world. As the global use of a racial epithet connects through rejection, Du Bois reconfigures the logic of diasporic sensibility to extend to and connect the whole of the darker world. We see this affective attachment in an exchange between Matthew and Kautilya when she explains the wonder and potential of India:

India! India! Out of black India the world was born. Into the black womb of India the world shall creep to die. All that the world has done, India did and that more marvelously, more magnificently. The loftiest of mountains, the mightiest of rivers, the widest of plains, the broadest of oceans—these are India …. For leaf and sun … for laughter and for tears; for sacrifice and vision; for stark poverty and jeweled wealth; for toil and song and silence—for all this, know India … oh, Matthew can you not understand? This is India—can you not understand?

To this Matthew replies: ‘No I can not understand, but I feel your meaning’ (DP, p. 227). Matthew’s response appears anticlimactic after Kautilya’s effusive speech, but is important for appreciating the quality of Du Bois’s utopian vision. For clearly, the emotional descriptions of India—its sacrifice and vision, toil and song—are traits that a cursory glance through, say, The souls of black folk, will show that Du Bois often associated with African America. And so, as Alys Eve Weinbaum has shown, rather than standardizing and evening out any of the differences among the members between black America and ‘black India’, he allows them a form of worldwide consciousness that they may not be able to explain, but whose energies they nonetheless feel. There is thus an affective connection to Du Bois’s utopian vision of an international coloured collectivity that grounds internationalism ‘in feeling rather than reason’ (Weinbaum 2001, p. 31). The hoped-for utopia in this sense does not need to be topos in any traditional sense, but is instead an affective space. It is a sensibility of the darker world needing location finally, in no particular place.

Instead, what Dark princess offers is a description of the world that is a dystopian place against which to measure the utopian possibility. A primary site, then, for both sets of imaginings—dystopian and utopian—is in the arena of black political involvement. We are led to believe, hope, and imagine that the birth of the child Madhu Chandragupta Singh will usher in a new model of black political allegiance that is immeasurably preferable to the politics in which African Americans are involved in the longest section of the novel, on ‘The Chicago politician’.

‘The Chicago politician’ section details Matthew Towns’s rise in the machine of Chicago politics. After having his release from prison engineered by local boss Sammy Scott and his calculating and amoral operative Sara Andrews who, for their own political gain make a deal with the Ku Klux Klan to advocate for Matthew’s release, Matthew and Sara marry. Along with Sammy’s influence, she engineers Matthew’s stunningly quick rise in the morally muddied world of Chicago politics until he is on the brink of being elected the first black congressional representative since Reconstruction—thus demanding that Matthew continually betray principle after principle in order to achieve what that world deems success.

As many commentators have pointed out, Du Bois performed a significant amount of research for this section. He was committed to achieving as realistic a picture of Chicago’s black political scene and its black community as he possibly could, down to modelling the character of Sammy Scott on Edward H. Wright, who by 1922 had become the leading African-American politician in Chicago. Thus, as the wintry Chicago comes to stand for barrenness: the sheer utility behind the loveless, sexless marriage of Matthew and Sara, the cynical manipulation underlying Matthew’s rise to this almost-historical moment in African-American political history, the coldness with which votes are bartered and bought and with which the concerns of the community are sacrificed at the altar of personal gain—Du Bois sets this up to not only present a dystopian vision, but also an already-existing dystopia.

It is essential for Du Bois’s narrative that Matthew balances on the precipice of a particular model of historical progress. Not for one second are we led to believe that, in the political schema that the novel provides, Matthew’s election engineered by Sara and Sammy would serve as any kind of corrective to American society and politics. We are not meant to see it as a return to the potential and promise of the Reconstruction period. Nor are we, ultimately, meant to see Matthew’s electoral success as any kind of interruption in a fundamentally oppressive sociopolitical cosmology. If anything, Du Bois produces a situation which reproduces the lament Matthew felt earlier in the novel wherein he came face to face with the realization of ‘all the culture in white America which he had unconsciously and foolishly, as he now realized, made his norm’ (DP, p. 24). The redemptive potential of black America in the midst of what Du Bois had earlier in the century called a ‘dusty desert of dollars and smartness’ (Du Bois 1965, p. 220) is in Dark princess in deep danger.

The production of utopia avant la lettre is here necessitated by the presence of the realist dystopia black Americans find themselves within and which comes in the pleasing shape of a specious progress. Black Chicago politics, as representative of the dysfunction of American politics, are depicted through a techno-political dystopic model. Cynical, lifeless, and technocratic, it is as Sara herself is described, characterized by ‘cold, clean hardness and unusual efficiency’ (DP, p. 109). And, as Matthew notes:

Chicago is the American world and the modern world, and the worst of it. Courtesy is dead—and Justice? We strike, steal, curse, mob and murder, all in the days work. All delicate feeling sinks beneath floods of mediocrity. The finer culture is lost, lost; maybe lost forever. Is there beauty? Is there God? Is there salvation? (DP, p. 284)

Matthew speaks here in terms of feeling and culture, but his experience as a political race man begs us to extend his questioning out into black political participation. Is this, Du Bois seems to be asking, the salvation so much struggle has sought to attain? A situation in which, as Dohra Ahmad writes, ‘the only transformative fantasy available … comes when Sammy Scott “envisaged a political machine to run all black Chicago”’ (Ahmad 2002, p. 780).

Du Bois forcefully juxtaposes Sammy Scott’s transformative model with the one exemplified by Kautilya and her work for the more radically democratic vision of an ideal multiracial unity against white global domination. Here, however, a major crack in Du Bois’s edifice appears. For Du Bois appears to locate the salvation of the coloured world, ultimately, in oligarchy.4 In a late moment of doubt, Matthew moans:

I believe in democracy … but I today and with the world, I see myself drifting logically and inevitably toward oligarchy … And how else? We Common People are so stupid, so forgetful, so selfish. How can we make life good but by compulsion? … Whether we will or not, some must rule and do for the people what they are too weak and silly to do for themselves. They must be made to know and feel. (DP, pp. 283–284)

Kautilya quickly calls upon him to adjust his definition: ‘And, oh, my Matthew, your oligarchy as you conceive it is not the antithesis of democracy—it is democracy, if only the selection of the oligarchs is just and true’ (DP, p. 285). Du Bois returns to his idea of the Talented Tenth, this time stretching it out across the globe and through the utopian space. In spite of the promise that Madhu is meant to mark, the product we are left within the final words of the novel—as ‘Messenger and messiah to all the darker worlds!’—suggests Du Bois’s inability to wrest himself free of the allure of royalty and ‘royal blood’. For as the masculine scion of the Princess Kautilya of Bwodpur, Madhu Chandragupta Singh will be the Maharaja of Bwodpur. Far from a ‘just and true’ selection of the oligarch, Du Bois’s abrupt swerve ends the novel and its utopian vision on a stirring yet disorienting note.

Putting oligarchic hazards aside for a moment, it is the ecstatic component of Du Bois’s ending that is essential to his utopian heralding. In his essay on Dark princess, Warren expresses some puzzlement about the conclusion of the novel, ‘festooned with prayers and invocations to a variety of dieties [sic]’ (Warren 2000, p. 166). Given Du Bois’s categorical statements about the separation of religion and politics which are ‘clearly out of tune’ with the novel’s end, Warren wonders how much stock we should put in ‘the suggestion that the ecumenical spiritualism invoked at the birth of Madhu constituted a necessary requirement for achieving his political goals’ (Warren 2000, p. 166). What Warren’s question downplays in favour of its focus on religion is, I think, the investment Du Bois’s novel has in ritual. Dark princess laments the forsaking of the ecstatic energies embodied in ritual and myth for the false profits of cold rationalism.

These energies emerge in strange spaces. Prior to the final reuniting of Kautilya and Matthew, Matthew becomes a labourer. Epitomizing to his former Chicago compatriots just how far he has fallen, he gets a job helping to dig a new subway tunnel in Chicago. Besides awakening him to an awareness of muscles he had never known and fatigue he had never felt, digging allows him plenty of time to ruminate. He writes to Kautilya:

I am digging a Hole in the Earth. It is singular to think how much of life is and has been just digging holes … And you have no ideas of the problems—the sweat, the worry, the toil of digging this little hole. For it is little, compared to the vast and brawny body of this mighty earth. It is like the path of some thin needle in a great football of twine. The earth resists, frantically, fiercely, tenaciously. We have to fight it; to outguess it; to know the unknown and measure the unmeasured. (DP, p. 264)

This is the utopian spirit. Matthew digs and digs in the face of a sweeping contradiction. It is a ‘little hole’ but it is symbolic of a vast, almost unfathomable enterprise. Yet the tenaciousness of the earth must be matched by that of the digger. Embracing the pain, fatigue and overwhelming futility of the task ahead, Du Bois deposits the idea that, as a character later puts it, we ‘must push always—on!’ (DP, p. 292). Continuing, seeking, looking ahead in order to ‘outguess’, desiring to ‘measure the unmeasured’: these are not the energies of death, but of life’s continuing insistence.

Those wondrous elements embodied in nature, ritual, and utopianism that a calculating, materialistic society has abandoned provide sustenance for what Matthew calls ‘the Plan—our Plan, the great Emancipation’, a plan which is expressive of utopian promise. But even the designation of the work of emancipation as ‘the Plan’ implies a bureaucratic component. Yes, the people like Matthew and Kautilya can envision, but they must be the vanguard for their ‘world-work’ which is, according to Matthew: ‘Not merely to transpose colors; not to demand an eye for an eye. But to straighten out the tangle and put the feet of our people, and all people who will, on the Path’ (DP, p. 266).

Brazen Machinery: George Schuyler’s Black Empire

Transposing colours by demanding an eye for an eye is indeed the design of the grand Plan driving the narrative in Black empire. Dr Belsidus, the novel’s prime mover, bluntly states his objective early in the narrative: ‘White world supremacy must be destroyed my lad, and it will be destroyed. I, Dr. Henry Belsidus will destroy it with the aid of my loyal assistants in all parts of the world’.5 Belsidus’s utopian scheme is, like that of Dark princess, on the one hand forward-looking (‘We shall run [the white man] out of Africa, out of India, out of the West Indies, out of the South Seas’) and nostalgic on the other (‘We shall elevate the Negro people to the proud estate they once occupied four hundred years ago’) (BE, p. 31). The achievement of black freedom through the destruction of a global white supremacy, combined with a nostalgic cherishing for what once was culminates in a geopolitical objective: ‘You will see in your time a great Negro nation in Africa, all- powerful, dictating to the white world’ (BE, p. 15).

Schuyler’s techno-political adventure rests on an act of radical disjunction; a break in the historical narrative that, unlike Du Bois’s novel, transforms the ‘old’ space—Africa, in this novel—into something gleamingly new. Whereas Du Bois’s novel may be read as a series of ideological blueprints for a new conception of life as it should be based in large part on how it once was, Schuyler’s novel goes further by providing a glimpse into the administrative components of a new, thoroughly modern utopian society. Unlike Dark princess, which closes at the point before dystopia can begin, Black empire, by envisioning the bureaucratic inner workings of a society built on efficiency and strength, plunges headlong into complicating its utopian vision by challenging its reader to come face to face with an emergent dystopia. Whereas the former text flirts with and cannot fully pull away from oligarchy, Black empire embraces it and hurtles towards totalitarianism.

The narrative is told from the point of view of Carl Slater, a young journalist who when the story opens, is employed by the Harlem Blade. Slater, surprising Belsidus just after the latter has dropped the limp, lifeless body of a young white woman on the ground, is manipulated, strong-armed, and persuaded (with the assistance of some mysterious liquid drug and a pistol in the ribs) to join the Black Internationale, the organization led by Belsidus, as the organization’s secretary. Even though Slater’s first meeting with Belsidus is accidental, it appears that Belsidus already knows about Slater. ‘I know about every Negro intellectual in the world’, he tells Slater, and ‘need loyal race-conscious youngsters to help me … aid the cause of Negro liberation, not only in America but throughout the world’ (BE, p. 10). The apparent implausibility of Belsidus’s scheme defies the accepted boundaries of logic, but just as Du Bois does with his ‘logical’ connection of Pan-Africa and Pan-Asia, Belsidus’s unfolding of an alternative geopolitical scheme (it is not only the tenet of white supremacy to which Belsidus has ‘dedicated his life … to destroying’, but white world supremacy) is rendered through an alternative, but no less preposterous utopian logic (BE, p. 10). Slater, accordingly, notes that the plan sounds ‘mad’ and ‘rather Garveyistic’. Belsidus, significantly, does not disagree: ‘all great schemes appear mad in the beginning. Christians, Communists, Fascists, and Nazis were at first called scary. Success made them sane. With brains, courage, and wealth even the most fantastic scheme can become a reality’ (BE, p. 10).

While flourishing—for better or worse—utopian models form the trajectory of possibilities for the plan, qualities such as faith and hope are notably lacking in Belsidus’s schemes. Indeed, the cynicism of the programme routinely inhibits the narrative’s inexorable drive towards a utopian vision that would follow driving white imperialists out of the black world. For Belsidus, unity will only be achieved by strict obedience, amorality, and ruthlessness. For instance, he casually murders those who betray any of the principles of the Black Internationale (henceforth ‘BI’), erasing any traces of their existence by dissolving them in an efficient and powerful acid concocted by one of the BI’s scientists. The BI sows the seeds of dissension among the white American community by engaging in various acts of terrorism and attributing it to anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and white nationalist groups that Belsidus has himself constructed. He similarly orders the manipulation of the tenuous peace between the European powers. As the worldwide white community is too busy fighting among itself to notice what the BI is doing, Belsidus’s organization rapidly strengthens its hand by building an air force, training soldiers, stealing money, perfecting its scientific techniques, competing in the marketplace, and finally, rapidly constructing a hundred ‘Temples of Love’ across the globe. These temples serve as a base of a new religion cynically appealing to the black masses: ‘He’s going to give the masses of Negroes the sort of religion they want but haven’t been able to get. Music and dancing, no collections, plenty of pageantry, keeping things down to earth with enough sex to make everything interesting’ (BE, p. 58). After all, as Patricia Givens, the head of the BI’s Air Force (who later becomes Slater’s wife) outlines the necessity in manipulating the masses in any programme for revolution:

The masses always believe what they are told often enough and loud enough. We will recondition the Negro masses in accordance with the most approved behavioristic methods. The church will hold them spiritually. Our economic organizations will keep control of those who shape their views. Our secret service will take care of dissenters. Our propaganda bureau will tell them what to think and believe. That’s the way to build revolutions (BE, p. 47).

Although the outrageousness and radical nature of the plan might hint at a utopian impulse, the steps that the BI uses to accomplish their revolution introduce the suggestion that a dystopian future awaits this new civilization. The revolution, in fact, will be in the end accomplished by using the crushing mechanisms of white society that Du Bois maligned in Dark princess.

As white civilization is wealthy, mechanical, and efficiently militaristic, Belsidus argues for a multi-pronged, methodical, and coldly pragmatic initial approach based on subterfuge: ‘Embarrass the white man, disorganize the white man, disunite the white man, disturb the white man, but do not attack the white man except secretly and with skill and intelligence’ (BE, pp. 34–35).

To a delegate who expresses doubt about not ‘striking immediate blows for freedom’, Belsidus scoffs: ‘Have you forgotten Abdel Krim, Haile Selassie and numerous other chieftains from Fuzzy Wuzzy or Cetawayo who threw themselves against the machines of white civilization and failed?’ (BE, p. 36). When Slater earlier expresses doubt in the grand plan, citing the fact of white economic, industrial, and military hegemony, Belsidus briefly concedes the point for the present while being assured of the inevitable future. ‘They have now, but they will not have it long. I and my comrades shall destroy them or make them destroy themselves. We have brains, the best brains in the Negro race. We have science of which the white man has not dreamed in our possession’ (BE, pp. 10–11).6 Recalling the dismissive statement in Dark princess that all Europe has contributed to the world are ‘brazen machines’, Black empire respects the power of the ‘machines of white civilization’, but refuses to accept what they supposedly suggest about the legitimacy of their creators’ position of supremacy.

Black genius has all the capacity—albeit disregarded and rejected—of white genius, but it has one thing that the smug power of white civilization does not: ‘superior, or perhaps … more intense, hatred and resentment, that fuel which operates the juggernaut of conquest’ (BE, p. 15). Indeed, in spite of the physical and national differences between the technicians and architects of the Black Empire, whether (to name only a few) it be Sam Hamilton, ‘a wavy-haired brown man who must either have Hindu or Indian ancestry … one of the outstanding chemists in the United States … [who] the white people won’t give … a break’ (p. 17), or Alton Fortune, ‘reddish brown with gray eyes’ whom the ‘good white folks won’t let … work at his profession’ (16), or Juan Torlier, ‘a giant of a man, dull black’ from Spanish Guinea who had ‘seen enough of [European] misrule in Africa for it to rankle in his heart’, what connects the members of the Black Internationale is not only ‘hatred and resentment’ about white supremacy, but the corresponding ways it has hindered them and spurned their contributions to the project of progress.

Perhaps ironically, however, it is in the very attempt to do what Du Bois did not—or could not—do, namely begin to provide a detailed picture of the utopian ‘place’, that Schuyler’s text dramatically and finally undercuts the successful deployment of a utopian impulse. Indeed, in Black empire Schuyler anticipates Irving Howe’s later pronouncement that: ‘Not progress denied but progress realized, is the nightmare haunting the anti-utopian novel’ (quoted in Wegner 2002, p. 148). As Du Bois’s novel critiques the implicit, silent assent that results in the so-called progress exemplified by the Chicago politician, Schuyler’s narrative ensures that it exploits the tension between utopian and dystopian by calling upon his characters and, thus, his readers to be critical about what is done in the name of progress.

A telling moment occurs early in the second serial. In a conversation with the new Surgeon General of Africa, Dr. Andrew Mattson, Pat and Carl are told of the new health programme underway and are surprised to hear that very few hospitals are planned. They are stunned to realize that the new intention is to ‘deal with the problem of health and sickness rationally’ by ultimately ‘eliminat[ing] the unfit’ (BE, p. 148). As they tour the new medical facilities, they are welcomed into the ‘plain, efficient, clean’ office of the Surgeon General, ‘with not a superfluous article’ in it. There they are told of the new plan: ‘This clinic … is almost exactly like the thousands we are building throughout Africa. We have a staff of four or five specialists and six or eight nurses. Every person is given a rigid physical examination. No one can refuse. They bathe in the shower room there before examination. If examination shows them to be incurable we give them something to end their sufferings’. Although Carl and Pat react negatively—Carl finds it ‘monstrous’ and Pat ‘complain[s]’ that ‘It seems so brutal’—their concerns are summarily and casually dismissed (BE, p. 151). Notably, these protestations are quickly squashed and occur with less and less frequency. Indeed, from the very start of the novel, Carl has expressed discomfort with the coercive nature of the utopian project. Although his participation in the Black Internationale is achieved via intimidation and force, the narrative almost imperceptibly shifts to recast him as having joined the organization. Indeed, he demurs at first by saying that: ‘It sounds too much like jail’. Belsidus’s retort initiates the blurring of the line between the coercive and the consensual that will thread throughout the narrative: ‘No one saw you enter here. If I cannot persuade you to join me, young man, no one will see you leave. Indeed, in that case you will never leave’ (BE, p. 11). By the end of the novel, however, Carl Slater has, if not renounced desire then at least relinquished choice. Carl begins the last episode of the second serial: ‘I was torn between two desires. I wanted to stay behind with Pat and I wanted to go along and see this last decisive battle for the Dark Continent. Dr. Belsidus decided the question for me … “Get ready to go with me, Carl”, he commanded. “I guess we might as well be in at the kill”’(254). There is no further comment on this, but it suggests the way in which the new society is free of the ambivalences and contingencies that characterize the unordered, unefficient life. Carl does not need to choose, just as no one needs to choose a religion in this society, just as no one will need to decide what they will want to eat,7 and finally just as no one can refuse the medical examination that may end in their removal from the society. Coercion, in the ruthlessly organized modern society, no longer appears as compulsion, but as deliverance. The political logic of Belsidus’s empire relieves one of having to work through the antagonisms of choice and desire, thus avoiding the paroxysms of conflict and doubt that characterized, for instance, Matthew Towns’s agonizing over oligarchy and democracy en route to emancipation.

In spite of such a discomfiting vision of a utopian society, Schuyler’s tale of the re-conquest of Africa by a Black underground organization clearly resonated with a public that was growing increasingly agitated with racial conditions in the United States and that—along with much of the black world—had been deeply unsettled by Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Moreover, geopolitics aside, the impact of a story of triumphant ‘black genius’ allowed to flourish and test the limits of its own capacity cannot be understated in a country in which black genius seemed predestined to ride the rails. Schuyler appears to express considerably more cynicism in his own response to the work and the reaction it elicits. Recall his statement: ‘I have been greatly amused by the public enthusiasm for “The Black Internationale”, which is hokum and hack work of the purest vein. I deliberately set out to crowd as much race chauvinism and sheer improbability into it as my fertile imagination could conjure. The result vindicates my low opinion of the human race’ (quoted in Hill and Rasmussen 1991, p. 260). I am in agreement with those who hesitate in accepting this statement as the full story as the often-attractive pull of ‘hokum’, in spite of one’s knowledge to the contrary, arises in the novel itself. Attending a service at a Temple of Love, Carl almost unwillingly responds to a huge robot deity and its commands: ‘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’ (BE, p. 61). John Gruesser argues:

Schuyler, instead of creating a utopia in the Black empire serials, wrote an anti-utopia … to.

… expose the dangers of race chauvinism. If this is the case, then for Schuyler the irony of the Black empire serials and the public response to them may have been that the empire Belsidus creates is just as fascistic and repressive as the colonial governments he ousts. (Gruesser 1993, p. 683)

While Gruesser’s hesitancy to accept this text as a purely utopian enterprise is on the mark, I think one must also fully account for the almost gleeful satisfaction displayed in several sections of the text as Belsidus’s plan deliberately and precisely unfolds. The narrative rejoices in seeing the plans come to fruition and to ‘enter into the spirit of the thing’ even as it knows that it is ‘hokum’ in the best case, or unsettlingly draconian in the worst.

Black empire is in the end too practical and cold-blooded—it sucks out the poetic qualities necessary for envisioning a utopian landscape. So in what should be the space of the most hope, we find instead Schuyler offering his most jaundiced view: the participants of the Black Empire project must continue to swallow their own sense of morality—to the point at which amorality appears organic to the point that they do not view it as a loss; they must fully and unerringly believe in their own national and racial superiority; they take comfort in, or at least ignore, the elimination of ‘difference’ (or the substandard); they appreciate their power to exclude, even as they appear oblivious to it. Hence both serials end with images of a tear-stained Martha Gaskin. Gaskin, a white woman who has proved to be a fanatically loyal, successful, and cold-blooded operative for the Black Internationale, is shut out from the scenes of domestic and political wholeness that conclude both the ‘Black Internationale’ and the ‘Black Empire’ sections of the text. Gaskin will never be what she desires to be for Belsidus; concurrently, she cannot be fully a part of the society. Although Schuyler suggests that Belsidus and Martha have been lovers, as a white woman in this society she will never be allowed to feel the completion of the bond of love and domestic fulfilment, no matter what kind of loyalty she has shown. This lack is thrown into sharp focus against the background of domestic and political wholeness. The political project of a free, unified Africa with its children returned from diasporic exile now completed allows for the main characters Carl Slater and Patricia Givens to focus on their union and their imminent parenthood.

The end of both serials undermines the suggestion that Schuyler is in the end writing a purely cautionary tale. We see what has happened to the society and may like Carl Slater or Patricia Givens in the medical scenes feel uneasy. All the same, the imagined future social nastiness—in other words, the spectre of dystopia—is quickly downplayed and overridden by the wonder and celebration felt in the purported achievement of utopia and the new advances that were made possible by black industry and genius. Ending, as does Dark princess, with the prospect of new life on the horizon, in spite of what seems its probable trajectory towards dystopia, Black empire refuses, ultimately, to completely suspend utopian possibility.

Conclusion

The reaction to the Black empire serials across the black community was electric. A brief but telling example is related in Hill and Rasmussen’s ‘Afterword’ to Black empire, which includes an excerpt from a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier from a Chicago reader named Louise Kelly. In May of 1937, Kelly writes: ‘I want to understand about this Dr. Henry Belsidus. Is his conquest going on now, at the present time, in Africa?’8 Although the newspaper assures her that it is fiction, one can reasonably infer, even within the hesitancy that causes her to write to the paper for corroboration, the note of expectancy and even hope in Kelly’s letter. There is, after all, the sense in Kelly’s letter that Belsidus’s activities might actually be possible. That expression of the utopian impulse is after all why Louise Kelly writes her letter, as it is why we are often attracted to the utopian. And yet in her question to the newspaper we can hear a simultaneous infusion of doubt and caution. It may be a hesitancy born of firsthand knowledge of a world often stacked against the hopes, concerns, and lives of black people. We might, thus, read in Kelly’s letter the same types of contradictions found in Dark princess and Black empire. Expressed in Kelly’s letter, as it is in Du Bois’s and Schuyler’s texts under examination here, is the utopian contradiction which calls upon us to negotiate the internal battle between the way the world is and the way we wish it to be. It has been argued that utopias are fictions that deal with possible, as opposed to existing worlds. But of course that is inadequate when probing the utopian dynamics that drive both Du Bois’s and Schuyler’s texts. Utopia, although ostensibly involved in the project of looking towards the future, has as much stake in the remaking of the present. The anticipatory visions of a future world are wholly dependent on their authors’ grasp of the concerns and assumptions of their present. The alternatives they suggest are, in the end, incumbent on the depth of their knowledge of the racial dynamics of the modern world. Dark princess and Black empire, however, also take pains to highlight the intelligence and stalwart ingenuity of their black protagonists, continuing on in spite of the seemingly insurmountable monolith of white dominance. As expressions of a utopian impulse, the novels do not only insist upon a better future world, but also exhort us to believe that the seeds of that better world are already with us.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Black empire comprises two separate serials written by Schuyler under the nom de plume Samuel I. Brooks and which originally appeared in 62 weekly installments in the Pittsburgh Courier between 1936 and 1938. The first was entitled ‘The Black Internationale: story of black genius against the world’ and ran in the Pittsburgh Courier between 21 November 1936 and 3 July 1937. The second, ‘Black empire: an imaginative story of a great new civilization in modern Africa’, appeared in the Courier from 2 October 1937 to 16 April 1938.

  2. 2.

    W.E.B. Du Bois, Dark princess: a romance (1995), p. 20. Subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically in the text as DP.

  3. 3.

    See especially Weinbaum (2001) for further discussion of Du Bois’s use of rhetoric of biology, reproduction and black maternity in the novel.

  4. 4.

    See Warren (2000) for further discussion of the oligarchic turn in Du Bois’s novel. Also see Weinbaum (2001) for further exploration of Dark princess’s elitism.

  5. 5.

    George Schuyler, Black empire, edited by Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1991), p. 10. Subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically as BE.

  6. 6.

    Schuyler outlines a stunningly prescient series of scientific achievements by the BI, arguing through Givens that: ‘it is the skilled technician, the scientist, who wins modern wars, and we are mobilizing the black scientists of the world. Our professors, our orators, our politicians have failed us. Our technicians will not’ (BE, p. 46) Schuyler, in the tradition of speculative fiction, outlines a vast array of scientific and military innovations that our world has come to see and, often, to fear. Among them, the BI has, for instance, perfected a system of hydroponic growing that allows them to not only grow healthy food quickly, but gives them the upper hand in the produce market. Later, after Africa is liberated, the BI scientists come up with ways of preparing raw food that will allow people to gain the fullest amount of nutrients. The BI weakens the European countries by unleashing waves of rats infected with plague, smallpox and other deadly diseases into the major cities across Europe, and in another instance of sabotage of a European power, gasses to death en masse thousands of England’s best technicians. The air force is protected by the use of underground hangars and control centres, and finally, the BI defeats the combined might of the European powers who aim to reclaim Africa for themselves by the use of an ‘infernal ray machine’ which is described as two machines in one: ‘first of all an atom smasher, a huge cyclotron, which generates an atomic or proton beam which can disintegrate any metal. Secondly, it is a developer of a radio beam which possess the faculty of stopping the propeller of machines and rendering batteries and connections useless’ (BE, p. 245). At the end of the story, this machine is unleashed on the armies and navies of Britain, France, Italy and Germany—defeating them—and the Black Empire takes its place among the forever free nations in the world.

  7. 7.

    Dr. Mattson takes Pat and Carl on a tour of the Empire’s ‘Model Diet Kitchen’. What the inhabitants of the Black Empire eat and drink is rigidly controlled, as is the method of preparation. This diet is ‘the rule in every district in the empire and is incorporated into the tenets of our religion’ (BE 152). People are fed fresh, raw food in communal kitchens. The result, at least initially, is that ‘the people are happier, more industrious and more productive’ (BE, p. 152).

  8. 8.

    Dr. Mattson takes Pat and Carl on a tour of the Empire’s ‘Model Diet Kitchen’. What the inhabitants of the Black Empire eat and drink is rigidly controlled, as is the method of preparation. This diet is ‘the rule in every district in the empire and is incorporated into the tenets of our religion’ (BE 152). People are fed fresh, raw food in communal kitchens. The result, at least initially, is that ‘the people are happier, more industrious and more productive’ (BE, p. 152).