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MATTHEW DISCHINGER Georgia Institute of Technology Percival Everett’s Speculative Realities SINCE THE PUBLICATION OF HIS DEBUT NOVEL, SUDER (1983), PERCIVAL Everett’s staggering artistic output has provided critics with a literary corpus nearly unmatched by his contemporaries: to date, Everett has published thirty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. One common thread through nearly all of Everett’s wide-ranging work is its anticipation and subversion of its own critical reception. His novel Erasure (2001), for instance, takes to task the literary marketplace that privileges specific strands of literature as authentic portraits of black life at the expense of others. The novel tells the story of Thelonious Monk Ellison, a black writer who, after being told by editors that his writing is not “black enough,” writes a blistering satire of stereotypical black life (2). That novel is hailed as a masterpiece, however, revealing what Margaret Russell calls the “nouveau-racism” of the publishing industry (358). Likewise, Everett’s public statements reveal his trademark suspicion of critical categories that shape both academic discourse and reading publics. In a 1991 essay on the future of black writing and black readership, Everett argues that both readers and critics pigeonhole contemporary black writing: Simply put, our readers are white. . . . We are at the economic mercy of a market which seeks to affirm its beliefs about African-Americans. An army of liberal book-readers marches into stores and feeds on fad and trend and reads, but not too deeply, and so does to our work what the movies seek to do. . . . Even our scholars often read for the mere promotion of a theory (and therefore their careers) instead of a true pursuit of meaning and understanding outside the realm of their scholastic backyards. . . . We must consider whether we should be relying at all on scholars or the present book-buying public as tools of validation for books by African-American writers. (“Signing to the Blind” 10-11) While Everett is rarely so direct in his critiques of critical approaches to his writing today, he made similar remarks about the relationship between literature and criticism in an interview published in Virginia QuarterlyReview.Whenaskedaboutcriticsinterpretinghisexploration of broad philosophical questions as an interrogation of blackness—and, 416 Matthew Dischinger thus, fencing his work into one of many “scholastic backyards”—he responded in similarly direct fashion: See, that has less to do with my work than it does with the people who are discussing it. And that’s interesting to me. If they are aware of that, then it becomes even more interesting. The critical work of any work of art has to understand that the work itself is seldom the only source of the criticism. The criticism necessarily is criticism not only of the work that it portends to be, but also of the mission of the critics. And so, in that way, any work constructs, as another level of art, the critic that is criticizing it. (Dischinger 264) Despite the many differences between his 1991 essay and his more recent public statements, both target the critic who continues to argue that nonwhite writers must write about their nonwhiteness. His statement begs the question: what kind of criticism does his work construct? Everett’s fiction often exists in the liminal spaces between meeting expectations and rejecting them outright: it centralizes the expectations of readers and critics yet again only to disturb and deconstruct them. One effect of his work, then, is that we are left to ponder what our expectations have foreclosed. If black writers must write about their nonwhiteness, then whiteness, in this formulation, becomes an invisible, unmarked category for both the critic and the writer. This essay will neither argue that Everett’s twenty-first-century writing is no longer interested in American conceptions of race nor merely offer the familiar critical refrain that his work shifts our understanding of blackness—which of course, it does. Instead, I will examine a few of Everett’s white characters, who have received almost no critical comment at all. This omission is understandable given the current state of whiteness studies as a field. As Robyn Wiegman argues, it has largely disintegrated because of its inability to “bridge the gap...

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