"It's a black thang maybe": Postmodem Racism in Percival Everett's Erasure

Abstract

This thesis examines the nature and consequence of Percival Everett's engagement with the contemporary phenomenon of postmodern racism in his novel 'Erasure'. To avoid perpetuating the idea that a critic is responsible for discussing African-American novelists as such, it explores Erasure's satire of the position and positioning of African-American authors by today's publishing industry on the novel's own terms. That is, it investigates the interplay of stereotypes, postmodern racism, and the biographical positivism lingering in the reception of the texts by the novel's protagonist, Thelonius "Monk" Ellison, and Everett through the application of the theoretical and literary frameworks that the satire invites, notably the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. The discussion of the impact of postmodern racism on the boundaries of authorship explored by Monk's and, more broadly, Everett's resistance to the collapsing of race and writing is framed in terms of the modernist resonances of Wright' s 'Native Son' in the "proof' of Monk 's "blackness" -- the meta-diegisis 'Fuck' -- and the recurring allusions to Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man' in Monk's narrative, which negotiate the commercial potential and staggering limitations for the African-American novelist who renders the stereotypically "authentic African-American experience" associated with the ghetto lifestyle. What emerges in this project is the notion that 'Erasure' is Everett's most important work precisely because it provides an alternative interpretive model for reading his output as a whole.