Resource Radicalism and the Solar System of Black Empire

Abstract

This article isolates an overlooked preoccupation in 1930s African American literature with America’s emergent energy system and a literary history of power indispensable to understanding today’s energy crisis as a social crisis. For George Schuyler, the physical power of a recently gridded America exposes the intractability of a racial politics from the inequalities accelerated in the nation’s new energy infrastructure. Schuyler’s Black Empire (1938 [1991]) contributes to the literary history of energy by turning the specifically aesthetic qualities of energy into a source of resource radicalism—what anthropologist Dominic Boyer calls ‘energopower’—exposing the two sides of power and the narrative shape of an energy system to come.