The Plot of Racial Data and George Schuyler's Black No More.
The characters of George Schuyler's Black No More (1931) share a problem in common. They cannot read data. Foregrounding these scenes of misreading, this article argues that Black No More is a literary and sociological experiment in cultivating precisely that which its characters lack: data literacy...
| Publicado en: | Novel: A Forum on Fiction Vol. 58; no. 2; pp. 229 - 255 |
|---|---|
| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Artículo |
| Publicado: |
Duke University Press
Aug2025
|
| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| Sumario: | The characters of George Schuyler's Black No More (1931) share a problem in common. They cannot read data. Foregrounding these scenes of misreading, this article argues that Black No More is a literary and sociological experiment in cultivating precisely that which its characters lack: data literacy. The article proceeds to show how Schuyler successfully parodies the sudden rise of data fetishism in 1920s North America while simultaneously encouraging his audience to read—not for what the data supposedly says but for the narrative processes by which new data sets and systems generate and consolidate racist fictions. Subsequently, this article reframes Black No More as a valuable experiment that tests whether novelistic fiction can function as a form of political reeducation at the exact historical moment in which racial and class difference is being recodified through new data regimes. |
|---|