The excitement generated by the release of the Marvel Comics-based movie, Black Panther, brings to mind the man whose work of science fiction became the first by a black writer to make its initial appearance before the public as a novel. With the 1931 publication of his Black No More, George S. Schuyler becomes someone who presents an alternative to the sameness of accepted American literature. Before Schuyler, not only is there no black writer of science fiction whose novel had not begun in serialized form, there is also no black author who had written a satiric novel, and no black writer who demonstrates a mastery over what is called the “Master Discourse” in the manner which Schuyler succeeds.

Black writers certainly had produced works having non-traditional settings before Schuyler, but most of these works fall under the term “speculative fiction,” which includes the genres of fantasy and horror as well as science fiction.  Writer Jess Nevins, who sometimes writes articles focusing on science, technology, science fiction, futurism, and fantasy, gives a reader a history of how blacks have contributed to speculative fiction in a piece titled “The Black Fantastic: Highlights of Pre-World War II African and African-American Speculative Fiction.” Nevins points out that an early practitioner of the fantasy genre of black speculative fiction, that which deals with futuristic themes and alternate histories, is Martin Delaney who, in 1859 “in response to the slave insurrection panics of 1856 and the Dred Scott decision of 1857,” wrote Blake, a novel which “describes the heroic black revolutionary Henry Blake in his attempt to rouse black Americans into a slave revolt and establish a new black country in Cuba.” Blake certainly may be considered a work of alternate history, but it is not science fiction.

The same may be said of the stories collected in Charles Chesnutt’s 1899 The Conjure Woman. These tales, based on black Americans’ understanding of the traditional spiritual beliefs of West and Central African peoples, fall in the horror category (in much the same way as Roman Catholicism serves the purposes of horror for a writer like Dan Brown in his The Da Vinci Code). Schuyler’s fictional character, on the other hand, is a man of science who uses technology to accomplish his goal: to transform any paying black customer who wants to appear white.

To see an early example of a work of science fiction by a black writer prior to George Schuyler’s Black No More, a reader can look back nearly three decades before his book to 1902’s Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins, whom Nevins calls “the most prolific African-American woman writer of her time,” and “one of African-American literature’s foremothers.” Hopkins’s work meets the definition of science fiction in that she imagines a modern civilization of “the direct descendants of the Ethiopia of 6000 B.C.E. and the possessor of advanced crystal-based technology, including suspended animation for the most beautiful in the city and technology-based telepathy.” Hopkins’s novel, however, began in serialized form. This leaves Schuyler as the earliest black writer of science fiction whose work – as said before – debuted as a published novel.

Oh, what a novel it is! While science and technology serve as needed components of its plot, it is satire that is essential to its purpose: to skewer the nation’s then-prevailing notions on race as it relates to identity by holding up a mirror to those who held those notions, albeit a distorting, funhouse mirror. And, who better than Schuyler to show how grotesque one’s image appears when seen on such a reflective surface? If forced to give a one-word description of the man, the word is iconoclast; iconoclasm is a necessary tool of the satirist. Michael W. Peplow, in his book, George S. Schuyler, quotes historian John Henrik Clarke on Schuyler. Clarke says he “used to tell people that George got up in the morning, waited to see which way the world was turning, and then struck out in the opposite direction.” In Black No More, this tendency serves Schuyler well. One can’t help but see how the satire does not simply bite, but chomps; the book’s title alone should suffice to demonstrate this.

Of course, presenting satire from a black American’s perspective was not something to which Schuyler could lay proprietary claim; Peplow, in a footnote to his article, “George Schuyler, Satirist: Rhetorical Devices in Black No More,” makes this plain by quoting W.E.B. Du Bois from the March 1931 issue of The Crisis. Du Bois writes that “American Negroes have written satire before, usually in small skits in columnists’ paragraphs.” Indeed, they had. In that same passage, Peplow goes on to note that “Elements of satire had appeared in the poetry, short stories, dramas, and columns of writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, W.E.B. Du Bois, Wallace Thurman, and Rudolph Fisher,” but he categorically states that “Black No More was the first book length satire to be written by a black author in the United States.”

The evidence for Schuyler’s novel demonstrating his mastery over the Master Discourse may lie more in one’s perception than in anything tangible. A term coming from the field of psychoanalysis, the Master Discourse is based upon early 19^th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and, when viewed as an external rather than internal (self-conflicted) process, may be seen as an interaction between two or more individuals. When applied to culture, it is not difficult to see how it relates to the dominator-dominated dynamic that plays out in American society between wealthy, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant males and everyone else. The Master Discourse, however, is but one of four postulated discourses, the other three being the “University,” the “Hysteric,” and the “Analyst.”

It is the Analyst Discourse which is significant here in that it is defined as an intentional subversion of the Master Discourse. As an example of how Schuyler does this, consider that by the end of Black No More, the stampede to become white is subverted by a new-found suspicion of and disdain for whiteness, even among the naturally white. This absurd turn of events is crystalized for a reader when Schuyler writes “…it was a common thing to see a sweet young miss stop before a show window and dab her face with charcoal.”

It is doubtful that those who shared the basic values and assumptions of the Master Discourse had ever encountered anything even remotely similar to the sensibilities of Black No More. Many American novels were published in 1931. William Faulkner’s reputation was made that year with the publication of Sanctuary. Fannie Hurst, the sometime-patron, sometime-companion of Zora Neale Hurston, gave us Back Street. There was Upton Sinclair’s Roman Holliday and Pearl S. Buck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good Earth. Schuyler’s was not even the only science fiction novel published that year, but of all the novelists, no matter their genres, Schuyler was the only black. That alone constituted a challenge to the status quo, yet that challenge did not end there. It rightfully can be said his upending of the commonly accepted thinking of the dominant culture is further demonstrated by his showing a distinct sameness between black and white Americans. As pointed out by Jane Kuenz in “American Racial Discourse, 1900-1930: Schuyler’s ‘Black No More,’” “Schuyler’s depiction of the U.S., black and white, is uniformly bleak: a world in which everyone is subject to and motivated by the same ruthless social and economic forces and out of which select winners emerge by dint of their own corresponding ruthlessness.”

A reader familiar only with the then-accepted literature would see something new in Schuyler, something wholly different from the earnestness of writers like Anna Julia Cooper or Du Bois or Alain Locke. That any black should be able to write as cogently and elegantly as these and others would undoubtedly subvert the thinking of some of those ensconced in the ivory towers of the era; that Schuyler writes so ferociously must surely have been a revelation. Perhaps it will be revealed to modern readers who also enjoy watching the movie-screen exploits of comic book heroes.