This book presents different aspects of George Samuel Schuyler's unique approach to the race question. It presents Schuyler as a centrally important twentieth-century black intellectual and as an essentially liberating figure for his unique application of satire to the race question. The book does not shy away from pointing out the satirist's most flamboyant moments of nearsightedness, farsightedness, and outright blindness. Its central concern remains the complex intellectual and political commitments that make Schuyler irreducible to such one-word descriptions as socialist, conservative, ama ... More

This book presents different aspects of George Samuel Schuyler's unique approach to the race question. It presents Schuyler as a centrally important twentieth-century black intellectual and as an essentially liberating figure for his unique application of satire to the race question. The book does not shy away from pointing out the satirist's most flamboyant moments of nearsightedness, farsightedness, and outright blindness. Its central concern remains the complex intellectual and political commitments that make Schuyler irreducible to such one-word descriptions as socialist, conservative, amalgamationist, integrationist, or antiessentialist. In his effort to fashion and project a unique black American identity, he took pleasure in playfully pitting such typical categories against one another. At different points in his career, Schuyler embraced almost all of them, especially the ones he found useful in disputing what he regarded as the narrow, racially motivated standard of his average reader. His ironic, open approach to the race question in many ways anticipates this new historical circumstance, where the invention of multiple racial identities has begun to supersede accounts of group distinctiveness based on narrow assumptions of biological essence or static notions of tradition. Schuyler struck an early blow for audacious independence on racial issues.