Satire as Protest: George Schuyler’s Black No More and Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker The Berry

Abstract

George Schuyler and Wallace Thurman are usually regarded as the popular satirists of the Harlem Renaissance Movement. Although satire is both a specific literary genre and a literary manner, in this paper, however, satire is seen as a literary manner in which the follies and foibles, or vices and crimes of a person, mankind or an institution are held up to ridicule in a bid to reform. Thus, while Schuyler’s satire in Black No More is directed at the larger American society for their discriminatory tendencies predicated on skin colour, Thurman’s satire in The Blacker The Berry is targetted at the Negroes who discriminate against themselves on slight colour differences. Therefore, the two writers, although from differing perspectives, attack the American “colour-phobia.” Hence, satire serves as a protest tool of the two artists.

LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research, 8(4), 140-148, 2011