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Not Black, Not Black Enough and Both Satirical Investigations of Race in Percival Everett’S Novels

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Not Black, Not Black Enough and Both Satirical Investigations of Race in Percival Everett’S Novels Not Black, Not Black Enough and Both Satirical Investigations of Race in Percival Everett’s Novels Dissertation zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie am Fachbereich Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften vorgelegt von Johannes Kohrs Berlin, 2020 Erstgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Ulla Haselstein Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Florian Sedlmeier Tag der Disputation: 19. Dezember 2018 Acknowledgements I dedicate this work to my wife Laura for her loving support throughout the tumultuous experience of writing this book. I would like to thank my family, my mom for introducing me to the world of music and art and my dad for putting a Baldwin in my hands when I was seventeen or so. This work would not have been possible without the critical feedback and generous encouragement of Ulla Haselstein. My sincere gratitude goes to her, Florian Sedlmeier and Anthony Stewart. Among those, who have profoundly contributed to this work with their critical comments and suggestions, I would like to thank Christa Buschendorf, Marie Moeller, Joe Weixlmann and Ramon Saldivar. Special thanks are due to Nic Lindenberg and Katharina Metz. Finally: a shout-out to the “radical cohort.” Six years ago, a friend of mine told me about a hysterical satire titled erasure that I really should read. I would like to thank Marlon Lieber, with whom this whole thing started, and Percival Everett, whose friendship is much more than a footnote in this critical endeavor. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Race, Cultural Difference and Percival Everett’s Post-Millennial 4 Novels of Racial Satire Methodology Literary Politics: Race, Identity and Representation 26 Aesthetic Practice: Race, Writing and Ambivalence Chapter 3.1 Notes of a Native Novelist: 69 Institutional Blackness and Critical Uplift in the Self-Help Satire Glyph Chapter 3.2 The Black X-perience: 109 Invisible Intellectualism, Stereotypical Radicalism and Commercial (Self-) Exploitation in erasure Chapter 3.3 The Not Sidney Poitier Effect: 15 Social Mobility, Black Masculinity and Double Negativity in I Am Not Sidney Poitier Coda Coming Home from Satire 191 Notes 197 Works Cited 215 CHAPTER 1: Introduction Race, Cultural Difference and Percival Everett’s Post-Millennial Novels of Racial Satire What is the reality of race in the United States of America in the 21st century? How can we account for this arbitrary yet real concept and possibly move beyond it? And if it has no meaning beyond racism, to what extent, after all, are our current means of accounting for race potentially perpetuating the cultural and social structures undergirding the systemic persistence of racism? These concerns of identity, equality and democracy had been spectacularly pushed to the public forefront in what seemed to be the moment of race’s very own transcendence: the election of the first U.S. President of African descent. On November 5, 2008, Barack Obama was heralded as the progressive promise incarnate of a country compromising its own democratic ideals at home and abroad. Amidst a crisis of economic, political and social proportions (evident in the crucial keywords of the time: Lehman Brothers, Abu Ghuraib and Katrina), “Yes We Can,” the signature slogan of Obama’s campaign, resounded as a fierce counter-claim to these hallmarks of hypocrisy. Yes, America could elect its first president of African descent; and yes, an African American taking the nation’s highest office could be conceived as indicative of an unparalleled state of equality. Obama’s stellar rise, after all, showcased a spectacular social upward mobility. This euphoria was reflected in a Gallup poll conducted shortly after the election in 2008. According to this questionnaire, over two-thirds of Americans appraised Obama’s victory as the most important or among the two or three most decisive advancements for African Americans in the past 100 years. Almost seventy percent of the respondents agreed that a solution to the racial divide between blacks and whites would “eventually” be worked out.1 Obama’s election offered the historical moment of condensation to the notion that through this gradual progress the U.S. were (close to) reaching a race-free phase, in which (unrestricted) opportunity was granted to every citizen, even “a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant,” as Obama put it in his “Inaugural Address” on Capitol Hill. This putative “post-racial” turn incited a radical reconsideration of race that rippled through the political and cultural sectors of the nation. 4 - Introduction - Racism without Race: The Political Debates on the Putative “Post-Racial” Turn In a veritable “post-racial” hype, TV shows, newspapers, magazines, radio shows and blogs all capitalized on the nationwide attention that race and thus “post-race” received. Thus, the pressing question, which NPR asked its listeners in 2009 (“Are We Living in a Post-Racial America?” February 11), informed a vast array of responses from various political camps. Optimistic outlooks articulated on the liberal to conservative side of the debates sharply contrast with a host of critical accounts.2 “Promise,” “dilemma,” “myth,” “illusion,” “fantasy,” even “paralysis” – in numerous publications in the journalistic and academic sector (op-ed articles, political/electoral analyses, sociological and pedagogical studies) “post-race” figures as a sarcastic shorthand paired with one of these descriptors.3 This connotation of sarcasm increasingly dominated the term’s use as the initial Obama-euphoria was dampened by a growing disillusionment with the present and prospect of a “post-racial” America. The most prominent rebuttal of this notion, finally, came from the (former) President himself: “[H]owever well-intended,” Obama declared during his farewell speech, it “was never realistic,” as “race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society.”4 Accounting for the hegemonic force of race in the aftermath of the putative “post-racial” turn means to attempt “to make sense of a nation tossed about violently by the push-pull of racial domination and racial progress, one beset by racial contradictions and paradoxes,” Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer assert (The Racial Order, 5). The unsettling simultaneity of formal equality and structural inequality, based on the historical link between past and present forms of oppression that Michelle Alexander has drawn (The New Jim Crow), runs along various axes of identity, from race to class and gender.5 Both urban ghettoization and mass incarceration benefit from the “disturbing national trend” of the so-called “school-to-prison- pipeline” in the education system (ACLU), which seems to have remained very much “separate and unequal” (Cook).6 A gradually declining rate of high school dropouts (IES) contrasts with the fact that only 19 percent of African American adults (aged 25) receive a bachelor’s degree (in 2013, NCES). In the professional sector, the unemployment rate among blacks oscillates between two thirds and almost twice the national average (8.4% vs. 4.9%; Bureau of Labor Statistics). The “glass ceiling” on the management-level of U.S. businesses remains very much intact (EEOC), as does the asymmetry between the median black and white family-income (two thirds).7 These material realities of race interrelate with its symbolic force. It essentializes corporeal attributes (such as skin-color, bone-structure, idiom, physical and intellectual capabilities) as universal traits of identity.8 Denying the mythical force of this category that is operationalized to identify and classify human difference is not to 5 - Introduction - “deny that it has real material effects in the world; nor is it to suggest that ‘race’ should disappear from our critical vocabularies,” Diane Fuss stresses. Rather, “[w]hat is called for is a closer look at the production of racial subjects, at what forces organize, administer, and produce racial identities” (Essentially Speaking, 91-92). This has nowhere been more evident than in Obama’s own reception as the nation’s first black political leader. Far from having been uncritically heralded by blacks and categorically dismissed by whites Obama entered the political platform as a powerful figure of projection for the virulent racial assumptions harbored on both sides of the symbolic divide of race. The stagnating support of African Americans prior to his election, which arguably attested to the widespread fear among blacks of the first African American presidency being a hopeless case, contrasted with the liberal media’s appraisal of Obama’s alleged ability to transcend stereotypical notions of race. Obama first emerged as an icon of black national equality and global visibility, receiving the Nobel peace prize in 2009 as a prospective honoring for his much-anticipated (and partially accomplished) achievements such as nuclear disarmament, the Iraq war withdrawal, the shutdown of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, the promotion of minority rights and the reform of the health care system. His silence and relative inaction regarding race-specific issues, especially during his first year in office, soon caused widespread criticism. Both in his carefully orchestrated public bearing9 and policy-making Obama promoted political unification, which often de-emphasized potentially polarizing particularities of race to counter white anxieties of racial bias. Still, he was caught between the accusation of fostering “hatred for white people” and “acting white.”10 This inquiry approaches the concept of “post-race” as the keyword for the most recent and ultimately insufficient attempt to rebrand the post-Civil Rights debates on race, identity and in/equality and translate them into the 21st century. As such, the concept marks the culminating point of “color-blind” racism. In the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement and the on-going effort for social justice in the 1970s and 1980s, the neoconservatism of the 1980s fostered a sociopolitical climate of increasing hostility towards minorities. Suffering from the widespread retreat from affirmative action policies and deteriorating economic conditions, the black middle class became the prime object of macro-social and in-group contestation.
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