George S. Schuyler and the Appeal of Imperial Ethiopia

This chapter focuses on two of George S. Schuyler's novellas published serially in the African American newspaper called The Pittsburgh. It talks about “The Ethiopian Murder Mystery: A Story of Love and International Intrigue” and “Revolt in Ethiopia: A Tale of Black Insurrection against Italian Imperialism,” which were both written in response to the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. These novellas interact and engage with the newspaper's propagandistic reportage of the war in provocative ways. Schuyler's fiction mimicked the articles formally, encouraging in the newspaper's readers a fluid reading practice transcending the fictional/nonfictional divide. Schuyler in the 1930s was able to assume his readers' intimate familiarity with the contemporary nation and therefore actively manipulate the newspaper's generic features. In his melodramatic Ethiopian stories, Schuyler exploits the public's fascination with monarchy only to expose, in the end, the ironies behind that misguided sympathy.