Elementos do conservadorismo negro nos Estados Unidos: George Schuyler contra o movimento pelos direitos civis (1950-1968)

O objetivo deste artigo é o de analisar o discurso conservador do intelectual negro George Schuyler durante o período do Movimento pelos Direitos Civis. Schuyler fez parte de uma linhagem de conservadores negros que pautaram o debate sobre a questão racial na segunda metade do século XX, enfatizando a importância da moderação no ativismo negro e pregando o empreendedorismo como estratégia de desenvolvimento social no capitalismo estadunidense. Nesse processo, Schuyler se deslocou do campo progressista negro para o campo conservador e criticou veementemente as estratégias de lideranças como Martin Luther King Jr, Ella Baker e Malcom X.

Do gradualismo negro ao Sonho Americano: a formação do conservadorismo negro nos Estados Unidos

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar a linhagem histórica de conservadores negros na cultura política estadunidense. Devido ao protagonismo de lideranças progressistas no ativismo negro, reforçado pelos Movimentos pelos Direitos Civis na década de 1960, os conservadores afro-estadunidenses ocupam um espaço secundário no debate racial nos Estados Unidos. Contudo, os intelectuais negros cumpriram um papel importante nas dinâmicas políticas do país ao contribuírem com as correntes conservadoras mobilizadas a partir da década de 1950. Nesse sentido, George Schuyler, jornalista e literato negro, emerge como uma figura fundamental para a compreensão do conservadorismo negro nos Estados Unidos. A partir da sua trajetória intelectual é possível compreendermos os princípios que fundamentaram historicamente as agendas da intelectualidade negra conservadora e as mudanças históricas no campo conservador. Além de Schuyler, trataremos de figuras como Booker T. Washington e Thomas Sowell a fim de contextualizarmos o conservadorismo negro de maneira ampla.

Futuramas and Atom Bombs

This chapter shifts away from geographical landscapes to focus on technology during the period. Not only does the chapter examine debates over the “technological sublime” at the 1939/40 New York World’s Fair, it examines ways that science fiction authors use the “sf grotesque” to highlight the potentially devastating environmental and social consequences of uncritical forms of technological progress. The early work of Ray Bradbury and Judith Merril calls attention to the apocalyptic threat of the atom bomb by exposing its effects on the natural world as well as on human communities and bodies. Merril and George Schuyler also call attention to ways that ideologies associated with Western notions of science and progress have been used to support gender and racial inequality. In Black Empire (1938), Schuyler envisions innovative forms of renewable energy created by Black scientists that allow them to establish independence from Euro-American control.

O fim das fraternidades raciais latino-americanas no imaginário afro-americano: a viagem de George Schuyler pela América Latina (1948)

RESUMO O objetivo deste artigo é o de analisar o relato de viagem do intelectual afro-americano George Schuyler pela América Latina em 1948. A sua intenção era a de retratar a presença e as experiências dos negros nas forças armadas dos países latino-americanos, comparando-as com a situação dos negros nas forças armadas estadunidenses. Naquele mesmo ano, o presidente Harry Truman havia assinado uma ordem executiva para iniciar o processo de desagregação das forças armadas, tentando assegurar o voto dos negros em uma eleição disputada com outros dois candidatos. O jornal Pittsburgh Courier, no qual atuava George Schuyler, interessado em promover o debate sobre a inclusão de negros nas forças armadas, financiou a sua viagem pela América Latina. Schuyler acreditava na ideia, compartilhada entre várias lideranças negras, de que as sociedades latino-americanas, apesar da pobreza material, eram muito mais inclusivas que a estadunidense, possibilitando a mobilidade social das populações negras pelo continente, principalmente no Brasil. Entretanto, ao testemunhar a realidade dos negros latino-americanos, o intelectual fez um retrato distinto das representações difundidas entre os afro-americanos, apontando para a coexistência entre miscigenação e preconceito racial, um fenômeno considerado contraditório para estudiosos das relações raciais naquele momento.

Genius in the Raw

In his popular science fiction serial Black Empire, published pseudonymously in the Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1938, the satirist George Schuyler associates the light-skinned love interest with hydroponic produce and science kitchens. The tragic mulatta, an icon of nineteenth-century fiction, becomes in twentieth-century fiction a racial representative pointing the way to a hybrid future. However, the raw foods diet also generates a paradox: the modern mulatta is both pure and primitive, abnegating and appetitive; Schuyler’s fiction and his mixed-race daughter Philippa’s childhood celebrity both reveal a discomfort with women’s bodies and desires that might exceed the bounds of rational control.

Utopian biologies

In 1924, the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane acknowledged that anyone who tried to predict where science was taking us was obliged to mention H.G. Wells, since ‘[t]he very mention of the future suggests him’. Nevertheless, Haldane complained that Wells was ‘a generation behind the time’, having been raised when flying and radiotelegraphy were genuinely scientific questions, but they were now mere ‘commercial problems’, Haldane asserted, and ‘I believe that the centre of scientific interest lies in biology’. Haldane's conviction that biology was the key to the future was widely shared, and lies in the background of both these books. Helen Curry examines the early history of the dream of engineering new kinds of plants, using first X-rays, then colchicine (a chemical mutagen), and then the new sources of intense radioactivity that were created by the early nuclear reactors. By contrast, Ewa Luczak is interested in the influence of eugenics on American literature, focusing particularly on Jack London, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and George Schuyler. What unites these books (and the diverse topics they address) is new ways of imagining the future, specifically a future based in biology.

Modernism and the Affects of Racial Blackness

This chapter focuses on the dispute between two important figures of the Harlem Renaissance: George Schuyler and Langston Hughes. Schuyler's critique of the African American avant-garde in his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926) and Hughes's response in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) provide a focus point to understand how African American artists and intellectuals imagined their relationship both to Western modernization and avant-garde cultural modernism. This chapter stands as a separate essay from Barrett's surviving manuscript, as it appears to be intended for a different publication; its inclusion here is meant to supplement discussion from the previous chapters, although Schuyler and Hughes did not tackle the gender and sexuality aspects of Barrett's arguments so far posited in this book.

Black No More: George Schuyler and Racial Capitalism

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.