African-descended People Research Articles

Africa si(gh)ted in Spanish: an introduction

The introduction to this special issue, “Africa-Si(gh)ted in Spanish,” presents readers with essays that illustrate the creative energy emerging in various countries in Africa and the diaspora. The works analyzed may be viewed as exophonic literature, demonstrating how contemporary African writers are shaping African Hispanic identities that defy colonial nation-state notions of belonging and assert the centrality of Africans in interpreting the world. The “Africa-si(gh)ted” approach’ as we term it, involves simultaneously prioritizing perspectives drawn from African lived experience and reclaiming the place of Africa as an ever-evolving site of knowledge generation and negotiation about Africans and African-descendant people. We propose Spanish as a language of affiliation and relation amongst creators from different cultural traditions—drawing on Edward Said and Édouard Glissant respectively—to offer a deeper understanding of the novel communities of belonging that are being forged in African Hispanism.

Gender Wealth Gap in the USA’s Afrobeats Scene

The United States has been a space for global musical transnational encounters among African-descended peoples, with various artists collaborating. These collaborations have blossomed with the advent of Afrobeats—a loose term describing the contemporary transatlantic sound of popular African music. Although there are male and female Afrobeats performers on the African continent, this cultural exchange occurs more often between male artists and U.S. musicians. Because male artists are mostly invited for live performances, their visibility puts them in a position to perform with and collaborate with U.S. artists. As a result, male artists get nominations for global awards such as the Grammys and accumulate more wealth. For female artists, the result is less visibility and wealth. Using Tiwa Savage and Burna Boy—two Afrobeats giants—as case studies, this essay examines the factors that limit Tiwa, a female performer, from achieving the same wealth as her male counterpart, Burna Boy. Specifically, this study analyzes the sonic and semiotic representations in their popular music videos, Tiwa’s “Koroba” and Burna Boy’s “On the Low,” to understand why Burna Boy might have the edge over Tiwa. Their music and career trajectories shed light on how capitalism and sociopolitical issues, including colorism, might contribute to the gender wealth disparities between male and female Afrobeats performers.

The Kids Are All Right: Futurity and Black German Childhood in SchwarzRund’s Biskaya (2017)

SchwarzRund’s Biskaya (2017) is an “Afroqueer” novel that follows the travails of Tue, a queer Black German woman whose life is marked by the quotidian struggles of queer Black folx in Germany. However, Biskaya is also a work of fantasy, since SchwarzRund created an island (Biskaya) in the Bay of Biscay along the southern coast of Spain and France. In the novel Biskaya is home to African-descended people who have both voluntarily and involuntarily migrated to Europe as part of the labour market for centuries. In this article I examine the role of children in the novel’s discussions about Black German futurity. I argue that in Biskaya, SchwarzRund combines Afrofuturist aesthetics, Black feminist thought, and queer futurity to present us with a utopia that is not perfect but is in a state of becoming thanks to people like Tue, who realize the importance of being hopeful and working towards a better future. I focus on the role that kinship plays in this Black, queer futurity, because Tue’s relationships, both biological and non-biological, both with peers and with elders and juniors, are a key part of her transformation into being more hopeful about the future. While it is the importance of non-biological kinship ties in the novel that helps make it so queer, it is the intergenerational relationships that make the novel Afrofuturist. I look at how children in the novel allow SchwarzRund to pose several questions about futurity that can help unite Black Germans across genders, sexualities, and generations and empower all Black German folx to see themselves as agents of change.

“The Dead Have Been Awakened in the Service of the Living”: Activist Community-Engaged Archaeology in Charleston, South Carolina

AbstractIn 2013, 36 Ancestors of African descent were identified in an unmarked eighteenth-century burial ground during construction in Charleston, South Carolina. The site, later referred to as the Anson Street African Burial Ground, was buried beneath the growing city and forgotten in the centuries that followed. The ethical treatment of these ancestral remains was of paramount importance to our community. Historically, narratives relating to the lives of African descendant people in Charleston have been inadequately documented and shared. For these reasons, we engaged the local African American community in a multifaceted memorialization process. Together, we sought to sensitively ensure that the Ancestors’ identities and lives were fully explored according to the collective descendant community's wishes. To this end, we involved the community in researching and celebrating the Ancestors’ lives through arts and education programs and analyzed their and community members’ DNA to elucidate their ancestry. Our engagement initiatives increased access for all ages to archaeological, historical, and genetic research and encouraged active participation in the design of a permanent memorial. The Anson Street African Burial Ground Project provides a successful example of community-engaged activist archaeology focused on honoring the Ancestors and their descendants.

The Intellectual World of Phillis Wheatley and the Politics of Genius

Abstract: This article examines the life and work of Phillis Wheatley and her interlocutors to consider how African-descended people conceptualized liberty and formed an intellectual community during the American Revolution. Her poetry and epistolary exchanges, shared with a range of acquaintances in the Atlantic World, reveal an intellectual universe that she created for herself and one that drew her into the political spotlight. Leaders of the founding generation began to question the intellectual possibilities for an African girl in ways that held political implications for the future of slavery. I argue that Wheatley's life and work opens critical avenues for exploring intellectualism as an aspiration of Black life in early America, and that her world of ideas sheds light on the possibilities of Black girlhood in the late eighteenth century.

Undoing slavery’s anonymity: The politics of identification in twenty-first century Black Canadian poetry

This essay discusses the language strategies deployed in twenty-first century works by three Black Canadian poets that engage with the archive of slavery (Sylvia D. Hamilton, charles c. smith and M. NourbeSe Philip) and reads them as performing a counter-pedagogy of cruelty against African-descended peoples. The analysis focuses on the politics of identification pursued by these poets in order to bring back the memory of enslaved Black subjects into the realm of the ‘human’, and particularly the recurrent device of naming or renaming as a way to counter one of the most pervasive dehumanizing practices of slavery, the erasure of one’s past and the imposition of anonymity. By means of this linguistic resource they achieve common aims: restoring dignity to the enslaved, constructing an alternative site of memorialization, and dismantling hegemonic narratives of Blackness in the nation.

Black Indigeneities, Contested Sovereignties

In this article, I examine race, indigeneity, and sovereignty in order to understand the relationship between them as they structure the lives of Black people on the continent of Africa and in the African diaspora. Specifically, I am interested in Black Indigeneities and explore the following questions: What are Black Indigeneities, beyond the connections between African-descended and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, especially the U.S.? Indigeneity implies ties to land and heritage, but what does it look like when those ties have been weakened or severed? What does it look like for places and people living with the consequences of different but related histories of settler and indirect colonization and chattel slavery on both sides of the Atlantic? Rather than trying to arrive at definitive responses, I use these questions as a point of departure for outlining an analytical framework that identifies sovereignty as a crucial element in understanding the diversity of Black Indigenous histories and experience under different but related structures of power. I distinguish between indigeneities of remembering and indigeneities of recovery. I also seek to go beyond the concept of arrivantcy as a framework for understanding the indigeneities of African-descended peoples in the Americas.

Experiences of African American Spanish Learners in the US: mitigating racialization and fostering belonging through an inclusive curriculum

ABSTRACT This study investigates experiences and investments in Spanish language learning among African American graduates of a university in the southeastern US. In response to evidence of African American underrepresentation in this field, findings will forward those factors which may encourage advanced Spanish study and create a sense of belonging as learners and speakers. Data emerges from eight language learning autobiographies, each written by a self-identifying African American who completed a Spanish major or minor at university. Inductive coding and narrative analysis methods yield the following themes: (1) Limited family/community connections to TL speakers, but wide family interest/support for language learning; (2) Inspiring teachers, formal learning environments, and content, but with significant content omissions; (3) Navigation of racialization in classrooms and TL communities and (4) Learning Spanish shapes career paths, provides empowerment and self-understanding. Findings ultimately suggest that family support and positive experiences during formal learning can encourage continued study, and some learners navigate acute obstacles relating to racialization. The data further evidences the necessity for culturally relevant and social justice pedagogies which facilitate inclusive learning communities and curricular revision. Such revisions would include content representative of African-descended people, histories, and cultures; and an understanding of racialization in the Spanish-speaking world.

“Travel on the Highways of the Broad Atlantic”: Toward a Brief History of the Cape Verdean Packet Trade

Abstract Beginning with the purchase of the schooner Nellie May and concluding with the docking of the schooner Ernestina in the Port of New Bedford, Cape Verdeans in southeastern New England and on the Cape Verde islands off the West African coast purchased and refurbished old, decommissioned ships from New Bedford's bygone whaling and fishing era. Between 1892 and 1965, this fleet of ships, named the Cape Verdean Packet Trade, specialized in the transportation of goods, people, and news between the United States and the Cape Verde islands. The packet trade was a large-scale effort that transformed the Atlantic into a highway for Cape Verdean trade, communication, emigration, and family reunification. Cape Verdeans’ radical repurposing of the packet vessels converted the Atlantic Ocean from a site of dispossession, enslavement, and immobility to a reimagined zone of possibility and freedom through mobility for African-descended peoples. These Cape Verdean–owned and operated packets assisted Cape Verdean Americans in maintaining long-term connections to loved ones separated by the Atlantic. In this way, the Cape Verdean Packet Trade's more than 1,200 voyages connected the United States to Cape Verde as part of a transnational social field and single economic universe for more than seventy years.

Black Disability Politics in Black Military Service: A Perspective from Nineteenth-Century Fort Davis, Texas

ABSTRACT This article considers the role of the military in debilitating Black soldiers, focusing on the men who served in the Western Frontier immediately following the end of the Civil War, with particular attention to the men who served at Fort Davis, one of a string of posts located in West Texas. We frame this archaeological and archival research with critical disability studies to show how these men were motivated by what has recently been termed “Black Disability Politics,” acting both individually and collectively for their community’s care. The men, popularly known as the “Buffalo Soldiers,” occupy an important space in heritage narratives around citizenship rights, valor, and masculine achievement among African-descended people. Understanding fully the circumstances they endured and overcame contributes nuance and dimensionality to that history, while also providing a lens through which to understand the challenges faced by women and Black and Indigenous People of Color in the military today.

Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices

Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices

Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina

Justene Hill Edwards's brilliant book argues that the business ventures of enslaved people from colonial times to emancipation were integrated into the broader political economy of slavery in South Carolina. African-descended South Carolinians did not just labor for enslavers. Many worked for themselves in small enterprises and networks that permitted them, in many cases, a return. The book's graceful prose and lucid argumentation will appeal to students and specialists. Unfree Markets explores changes over time, arguing that enslavers’ efforts to regulate Black business activities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave way to predatory involvement in enslaved people's dealings in the nineteenth century, partly because of the state's shift from rice to cotton as the primary economic activity. This shift prefigured predatory capitalism of later eras. From 1686 onward, the colonial legislature worked to establish a legal framework that sanctioned independent Black business activities while bringing them under the control of enslavers.As South Carolina became a majority Black plantation society, its leaders worked assiduously to exert control over African-descended people's independent economic activities while at the same time sponsoring them. The task labor system of cultivating rice was exquisite industrial psychology that left labor time for self-directed enterprises. Enslavers also permitted bondspersons to cultivate marginal lands and hire themselves out for wages. The result was a seemingly widespread practice of marketing produce, poultry, and other consumables and a Black consumer market for goods, including, notably, alcohol. That symbiosis seems to have helped diversify the colony's economy, and enslaved people sold necessities to whites despite being legal chattel property themselves.Nineteenth-century South Carolina enslavers found self-serving reasons to prey on the economic activities they insisted enslaved people do. Charles C. Pinckney (nephew of South Carolina's constitutional delegate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney) was adamant that enslaved people cultivate their own food and trade surpluses for “luxuries of life” (133). In Hill Edwards's view, enslavers like Pinckney were predatory paternalists whose self-serving rationale twisted a novel form of exploitation into a defense of race-based slavery.Both enslaved and enslavers practiced recognizable forms of capitalism, which Hill Edwards understands as economic actors investing resources in activities designed to generate returns. It was not uncommon for an enslaver to encourage enslaved people to steal cotton, which that enslaver paid for in whiskey. The resulting configuration of capitalism was expansive. And Hill Edwards's definition provides enough space for enslaved market actors to be petty capitalists based on the concept of free time rather than freedom. One of the book's interventions is “how the rise of capitalism in the early nineteenth century undermined racial solidarity among white South Carolinians, while still keeping enslaved people in bondage” (83). This is a crucial point.Racial solidarity dissolved in slavery's capitalism, which in South Carolina meant that enslavers protected and extended financial interests in slavery by sanctioning Black enterprise. “Merchants were eager to sell to and barter with enslaved people, and in the process, thumbed their noses at fellow white citizens who opposed their trade with slaves” (165). Slavery's capitalism disadvantaged poor whites and enslaved people but for reasons that divided wealthy, poor, and enslaved. That fine-grained distinction is one of the reasons labor historians will benefit from this exceptional scholarship.Traversing contexts among enslavers and enslaved, Hill Edwards deftly expands categories of capitalism and labor value. Historians like Diana Ramey Berry have successfully linked the new history of capitalism with the lived realities of enslaved people, rendering them human actors in a system carefully calibrated to commoditize or commodify their labor, bodies, sexuality, and so on. Unfree Markets builds on this insight, along with many others, integrating enslavers’ strategies and enslaved people's counterstrategies, showing that even complex and robust business activities among enslaved people were subject to predatory manipulation by enslavers and other white market actors. Here slavery by itself does not fill the conceptual spaces of capitalism or its predatory form in this period, since so many market actors who were not enslavers were taking advantage of a lack of civil rights among African-descended vendors and producers. Below-market prices paid to enslaved businesspeople appear as a Black tax in a society in which slavery was tightly woven into the social fabric of racism. And enslaved people's success in some aspects of business does not mean they were winning contests with enslavers.Unfree Markets points to the post-Emancipation landscape of capitalism that disadvantaged free South Carolinians of African descent and, more broadly, predatory inclusion of later eras.

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

The Roots and Routes of African Religious Beliefs in the Atlantic World

This article analyzes how historians have framed and studied the relationship between slavery and religion in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. In surveying the historiography, it becomes readily apparent that historians are far more interested in writing about Christianity among the enslaved than the religious histories of African-descended peoples' diverse belief systems. It has been more common for historians to study how cosmologies in Africa became religions in the Americas because of the basic ideas that structure history as a discipline. Historical scholarship with a thematic focus on religion has a long tradition of examining how various heterogenous religious systems became incorporated into Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy. By contrast, African religions that display parallel belief systems, eclectic incorporation of multiple cosmologies, religious authority not tied to a text, secret and undocumented initiation ceremonies, and a stubborn disregard for time as a linear process have made it difficult to analyze their customs, traditions, and belief systems through a historical framework. Consequently, African and neo-African religions in the Americas such as Santeria, Candomblé, and Vodun continue to draw the attention largely of anthropologists, whereas historians are more comfortable working within the change-over-time model and a narrative structure of Christian creolization.

The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico

The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico

Emancipating early childhood literacy curricula: Pro-Black teaching in K-3 classrooms

The legacy of colonization includes stereotypes and misinformation about African and African descendant people as well as a void in an understanding the vast contributions of precolonial Africa to the world’s knowledge impacting knowledge, languages, music, art, and sciences that we take for granted today. This misinformation remains pervasive throughout society perpetuated in schools by ensuring that curriculum is dominated by whiteness and lacks attention to the histories, heritages, communities, and languages of Black people. Pro-Black practices in response to centuries-old curricular voids and misinformation about Africa, the African Diaspora, and African descendant people can lead to an emancipatory education for all students. In our work, we draw on tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy and descriptions of Pro-Black pedagogy to describe the work of 13 early childhood educators who are committed to using their knowledge from ongoing professional development at one school in the southeastern United States. The work represented in this article reflects data collected over four years and analyzed in answer to the question: What are Pro-Black highlights of teaching in one school which sought to develop and normalize culturally relevant teaching including challenges to the work and efforts to negotiate those challenges? Data (e.g. student work, lesson plans, PD session PowerPoints, participants’ responses to a questionnaire, informal commentaries throughout the PD process, and classroom observations) were collected and reviewed to develop this article. Recommendations are made for educators and scholars.

Black Destiny in the Minds of Philadelphia Sailmaker James Forten and Liberian Governor Jehudi Ashmun

ABSTRACT This article examines the divergent responses of Philadelphia sailmaker James Forten (1766–1842) and Liberian governor Jehudi Ashmun (1794–1828) to the question of the destiny of African-descended people in the United States. Forten, a leader in the African American community, came to oppose the American Colonization Society’s plans to promote Black emigration to Liberia. Ashmun, a White teacher and editor from New York state, played a significant role in establishing the colony. Although the two men never met, they led intertwined lives and stood enmeshed in rival transatlantic communication networks transmitting information about conditions in the young settlement. Central to understanding their opposing positions on the possibility and desirability of a biracial society are their contrasting conceptions of the “degraded state” of African Americans.

Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific

Historian Yesenia Barragan has produced a profound and cutting-edge interpretation of American freedom and unfreedom. In Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific, Barragan weaves a case study of Colombia into the larger fabric of Black Atlantic history. One of her major interventions is to rethink the significance of the early republican period in general and gradual slave emancipation in particular. These are well-known but rarely studied conjunctures, and the latter receives short shrift from scholars. Yet as Barragan asserts, Colombia's 1821 gradual emancipation law was a “relatively successful biopolitical experiment in social control” that generated a new racial order, new labor regimes, and new (if rarely fulfilled) antislavery sensibilities (22). This gradual emancipation rule, as Barragan calls it, took three main forms: self-purchase, public manumissions, and the so-called Free Womb provision. The book analyzes each from both the legal-political perspective and the perspective of the affected African-descended people. Together they shaped the possibilities of bondage and liberation for a generation.Freedom's Captives zeroes in on the Chocó, a relatively remote, rainforest-covered, and gold-rich province of northwest Colombia. Historically and to this day, the Chocó's population has been overwhelmingly of African descent, a legacy of Spanish colonialism, Atlantic slavery, and coerced gold extraction from the region's mineral-rich waterways. Yet as Barragan argues, the region's remoteness and mineral wealth opened possibilities for autonomy and even legal freedom for Afro-Colombians.Early chapters trace the rural and town-based worlds of both enslavers and unfree peoples of the Chocó, with a focus on the men who rowed boats and women who prospected gold along the infinite waterways of this jungle region. The story then zooms out to a national perspective of early republican legal and political cultures, with a focus on the 1821 gradual emancipation law at the Congress of Cucutá. At stake was the legal creation of the much-contested Free Womb provision, whereby a child born to an enslaved woman would at adulthood gain legal freedom but remained a “captive” until then (134). Barragan then returns to the Chocó to examine how these national legal changes informed the social calculus of Pacific lowlanders. The Free Womb captives endured an active market in the buying and selling of their unfree labor while self-purchase, the main route to legal freedom, fueled the extractive economy of gold mining. Public manumission ceremonies, despite their political and emotional charge, nonetheless reinforced the subordination of enslaved people. The book's narrative ends around final abolition in the early 1850s, when a new subsistence-based society took hold in the Chocó, much to the chagrin of Colombia's ruling classes.Scholars will find that the book has many strengths. For one, its constant comparisons to other country contexts add up to a thorough accounting of hemispheric changes in gradual emancipation. The comparative analysis is capacious and deeply integrated into every chapter. Barragan has read widely in the scholarship. I have not seen a monograph that so systematically introduces relevant interpretations of other countries. As Barragan points out, Colombians at the time were in conversation with other Americans about emancipation, hence our need to understand how Free Womb provisions and other abolitionist ideas circulated beyond Colombia. Students of comparative slavery and emancipation in the Americas will appreciate such thorough cross-country connections that are rarely made by historians, as well as the most up-to-date bibliography and synopses of the state of the field. But it is much more than that. The effect of reading this constant comparative framework is substantial. For the first time, the Colombian example feels properly integrated into the wider story of slave emancipation in the Americas. Barragan has placed the country at the forefront of the scholarship on the subject.On top of the important comparative analysis, the book is deeply researched. Barragan carried out work in six archives in four Colombian cities plus archives in Britain and the United States. (Investigating notarial records—notoriously byzantine—in the Chocó could not have been easy!) In addition to these manuscript collections, Barragan uses an array of historical newspapers and published primary sources. The result of such comprehensive research is a narrative that portrays the world of the Colombian Pacific in vivid detail. The everyday lives of free and enslaved rural lowlanders rise from the page. While warning us about the lapses and silences in the written record, Barragan has nonetheless reconstructed to a remarkable extent the stories of individuals struggling for freedom.A final strength is the writing. Barragan is a wordsmith. The care she has taken in crafting sentences shines throughout, making the book a pleasure to read. The grace of the prose only adds to the intellectual bounty of this important book.

What Happens to Black in the Afro-Surinamese Transatlantic Diaspora?

This essay tells a narrative of various contexts in the Afro-Surinamese diaspora that share a struggle around the meanings of Black. What happens to Black in the Afro-Surinamese transatlantic diaspora? Some of the questions addressed are, Which terms have African descendant people in Suriname and in the Netherlands used for themselves in different periods? What have Whites called African descendant people in Suriname and in the Netherlands in different periods? When does Black come to the fore? Who mobilizes the term and for what purposes? This exercise brings forward important features of the Afro-Surinamese “cultural archive”: the orderings of the world, specifically the terms of ethnic self-reference, that Afro-Surinamese forged historically. These terms also traveled to the Netherlands, where they met with clashing cultural-political terms and understandings in the dominantly White Dutch world.

“Hokum and Hack Work” as Crucible for Black Utopian Development: Tracing the Blueprint in George Schuyler’s Anti-Utopian Black Empire

“Hokum and Hack Work” as Crucible for Black Utopian Development: Tracing the Blueprint in George Schuyler’s Anti-Utopian Black Empire Christopher Allen Varlack (bio) The concept of the Black utopia is one deeply rooted in the African-American literary tradition, explored in science fiction and Afrofuturist works by authors dedicated to envisioning potential counter-futures1 for African and African-descended peoples untainted by the problematic notions of white supremacy and the traumas of repeated anti-Black violence across history. This includes landmark works such as Martin Delany’s 1859 Blake; or the Huts of America, W. E. B. Du Bois’ 1928 Dark Princess, and Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 Parable of the Sower, to name just a few. While “literary utopias have been written predominantly by white men and (to a lesser extent) women” (Veselá 270), the opportunity to erase the color line and to combat the systems of white supremacy that seemed so deeply ingrained in the social, economic, and identity politics of their time moved, and continues to move, Black writers to create in fiction what BIPOC have struggled to create in life, aided by science, technology, and an undying drive for race progress. The history of these projects is catalogued in part in scholarly works such as Landscapes of Hope: Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America (2009) by Dohra Ahmad as well as Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism (2019) by Alex Zamalin. Each acknowledges the importance of such Black-authored visions of “collective life and racial identity,” for these novels “outlined futuristic ways of being. They warned about the disastrous ways of contemporary life, while espousing radical notions of freedom. . . . They theorized what was scientifically improbable and the new black citizen that seemed impossible” (Zamalin 1). They created that possibility and envisioned a pathway for bringing their utopias to life. [End Page 74] In his engagement with the concept of the Black utopia in fiction, George S. Schuyler—a conservative Black satirist—devoted his work partly to challenging the United States’s obsession with race and not just with the white hegemonic structures in place that consistently work to keep African-American peoples oppressed. From his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926) to his inflammatory novel Black No More (1931), Schuyler also worked to oppose that same perceived race obsession within the Black community, often criticizing figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey and the organizations they came to represent for manipulating Black racial fears and the collective desire for social equity. Because of that opposition, Schuyler, according to Alexander M. Bain, “remains calcified in literary history as an iconoclastic satirist who marginalized himself by denouncing Pan-Africanism, dismissing ideas of ‘Negro Art’ formulated by Langston Hughes and others, and turning virulently conservative after World War II” (938).2 Yet, it is exactly that calcification that encourages additional study of Schuyler in the twenty-first century, his dual critique of the machinations of Black and white society providing scholars invaluable insight into the sociopolitical stagnation of U.S. society and, equally as important, contributing hindrances to development of the Black utopia. Much existing study of Schuyler’s utopian/anti-utopian work then tends to focus on his infamous Harlem Renaissance-era novel Black No More and the possibility for radical change explored with the deconstruction of the U.S. color line, if not socially or politically then through technological and scientific means. And while Black No More is an important text certainly worthy of additional exploration, especially given Schuyler’s revelations of the improbability of upending the racial dynamics upon which the nation’s very identity was historically based, there are other important works just as vital in their suggestion of African-American counter-futures and experimentation with Black utopia-building in fictional space. For instance, one of his lesser discussed works, Black Empire, offers what [End Page 75] many consider an Afrofuturist satire3 that, on the one hand, critiques structures of white racism that relegate African-descended peoples to second-class status and, on the other hand, critiques the internal problems within the Black community that hinder the unification of the Black...