But that's just mad! Reading the utopian impulse in Dark princess and Black empire

Abstract

This article examines W.E.B. Du Bois's Dark princess and George Schuyler's Black empire as 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 social order emerges. However, Dark princess and 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 their utopian novels, this paper explores how the trajectories of possibility in the two novels provide insights into the politics and poetics of their speculative writings.