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A Thesis entitled Post Soul Poetics: Form and Structure in Paul Beatty's The White Boy Sltuffle by LaVelle Q. Ridley as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Arts Degree with Honors in English Thesis Director: Dr. Kimberly Mack Honors Dr. Melissa Valiska Gregory The University of Toledo DECEMBER 2015 Abstract Nelson George's notion of the post-soul aesthetic--defined as the artistic vision of black artists who come of age after the Civil Rights and Black Power/Arts Movements of the 1960s and 70s--provides many African American writers and scholm's with a vehicle for critically examining contemporary African American literature and culture. In his 1996 debut novel The Whtte Boy Shuffle, poet Paul Beatty parodies and examines many spheres of contemporary black culture, among them the fagade of"white" multiculturalism, the queerness of black masculinity, and the globalization of black popular culture. I argue that the formal structure of the novel replicates Beatty's exploration and subversion of post-soul discourses on blaclcness. By simultaneously rejecting yet worldng within the category of"post-soul," The White Boy Shuffle evinces a post-soul sensibility that maintains the fluidity and playfulness inherent to the post-soul generation, illustrating Greg Tate's definition of post-soul as the "African American equivalent to postmodernism." Through the protagonist Gunnar I(aufman, a young black poet, I believe that the novel's form prioritizes poetry, which disrupts the fictional gem-e. Also, by employing particular racial nomenclature and consistent querying from Gunnar which satirizes past racial discourses, the novel signifies on the timeline of "America's never-ending discussion of race" and brings them forward for the post-soul generation to examine. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thaN( Drs. Kimberly Mack and Melissa Valiska Gregory for their help, encouragement, and guidance through this journey. Additionally, I would like to thaN( the University of Toledo Department of English for their consistent academic and financial support and the Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Summer Institute for funding the early stages of this thesis. No less important was the support of my family, close friends, and my partner Jack Alferio; thaN( you for always supporting me and keeping me accountable. iii Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iii Table of Contents ................................................................................................................ iv Post-Soul Poetics: Form and Structure in Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle ................. 1 Works Cited ....................................................................................................................... 23 Works Consulted ................................................................................................................ 24 iv Post-Soul Poetics: Form and Structure in Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle When Paul Beatty's debut novel The White Boy Shuffle was published in 1996, literary and cultural critics almost immediately began to identify it as a "post-soul" novel, a text that speaks to the complexities of black identity in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Coined by Nelson George in his 1992 book Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Bohos" Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture, the term "post-soul" signals a critical turning point in African American arts and letters. Defined by George as "the culture of African- Americans who've come of age since the demise of the civil rights movement in the late '60s" (xi), the post-soul aesthetic provides a framework for re-visioning what constitutes contemporary black politics and black art, performing what Bertram D. Ashe describes as an "exploration of the boundaries of blackness" (611). The White Boy Shuffle engages with a variety of post-soul topics, such as the fagade of white multiculturalism, the queering of black masculinity, and the perceived crisis in African American leadership. As a poet who chooses to use humor in order to work through racial discourses, Beatty does not hesitate to parody these subjects, revealing the absurdities sometimes inherent in the ways in which race, class, and gender are discussed in the contemporary moment. The protagonist, Gunnar Kaufman, is an emerging poet who, throughout the novel, develops his craft in disparate neighborhoods, allowing his poetry to speak to, for, and about post- soul America. For this essay, I understand post-soul to mean both a chronological framework for black artists coming of age after the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, as well as an aesthetic with specific characteristics, such as signifying on past racial conversations, disrupting traditional notions of blaclcness, and employing unusual mediums for expression. Additionally, I rely on Darryl Dickson-Carr's understanding of "literary signifying" for my essay. He states that the literary signifying found in novels such as The White Boy Shuffle is "closely related to postmodernity to the extent that it is 'a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges'" (30). He goes on to say that this form of signifying "presumes that the reader is conversant with a vast repelÿoire of discourse and cultural kmowledge," (30) which makes sense given that referencing and updating past cultural discourses is a central tenet of the post-soul aesthetic. For this essay, I understand signifying to be an act of both referencing and revising or changing past conversations and discourses internally (within the text) and externally (other texts). I argue that the form and structure of The White Boy Shuffle replicates the characteristics of the post-soul aesthetic by prioritizing poetry, employing consistent racial nomenclature, and simultaneously rejecting yet working within the post-soul category. The novel evinces a sensibility that maintains the fluidity and playfulness integral to the post-soul aesthetic. More specifically, I believe that a formal analysis of The White Boy Shuffle, especially the poetry that it spotlights within the text of the novel, will produce a necessary understanding of its literary value as a post-soul text. Although many literary scholars have cited Beatty's novel as an important post-soul work, they tend to limit their analyses almost exclusively to thematic and sociopolitical questions or its satirical style, failing to see how the novel's key formal elements ground and develop those very questions. Ashe, for instance, includes The White Boy Shuffle in a list of texts that he believes "negotiate contemporary America's confused and complicated racial terrain" (610), but I would argue that the novel cannot achieve this negotiation without Gunnar's poetry, which can be seen working through this terrain in the poems Beatty brings into the novel. Similarly, Mark Anthony Neal discusses Gunnar's "'queered' black identity"--both in terms of race and gender--and argues that he is as a "ghetto-fab ethnographer and cultural critic" (134) who represents the sea change between the soul generation and the post-soul generation. But the primary way in which Gunnar embodies this change is through his poetry, which tracks his own geographic, social, and political relocations. L.H. Stallings considers The White Boy Shuffle post-soul because it "reconsider[s] the importance of gender and sexuality in African American texts by and about black men" (99)--but this post-soul engagement is not just represented through character but built into the very fluidity of the text itself. Another typical reading of The White Boy Shuffle is to view it almost exclusively through the lens of satire. Focusing on how the novel deconstructs restrictive "gender hegemonies" (100), Stallings claims that "Beatty's use of satire.., is as important as the critique itself' (100), and that "Beatty turns to satire specifically because it is a form that will allow him to deconstruct the black public sphere" (102). However, Beatty does not actually consider himself a satirist. When asked "Do you think of yourself as a writer of satire?" in a recent interview published in The Paris Review, Beatty responds: "No, not at all .... I definitely don't think of myself as a satirist" ("An Interview"). Humor often 4 accompanies satire in writing, and The White Boy Shuffle, I acknowledge, is very humorous. However, Beatty recognizes this, saying, "There's comedy in the book, but there's a bunch of other stuff in there, too. It's easy just to hide behind the humor, and then you don't have to talk about anything else" ("An Interview"). While the novel maintains a certain level of humor, the purpose it serves is a post-soul commentary of racial discourses, which can be read as satirical given the tone and humor characteristic of Beatty's style. Given this, I believe that there are other, equally productive frameworks literary scholars might employ to interpret this novel. I assert that through analyzing the ways in which the novel is consciously constructed--the ways the poems displayed on the page project a post-soul sensibility and intrude on the prose, as well as Beatty's fluid use of the term "nigger"--the reader can understand the novel itself as a tangible mirror of the post-soul aesthetic. In
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