Unmitigated Blackness: Paul Beatty's Transscalar Critique

Maybe the reason so few people are funny these days is that nothing is identified as being absurd anymore. … The word is rarely even used, because for the dutiful American to acknowledge the absurdity of life implies responsibility.¹

—Paul Beatty

Towards the end of Paul Beatty's Booker Prize-winning novel The Sellout (2015), the narrator takes stock of contemporary African American art. The protagonist, known only by his last name Me, is at a comedy club when an African American comedian abruptly stops his performance as a white couple starts to laugh hysterically at his jokes. The comedian yells: "Do I look like I'm fucking joking with you? This shit ain't for you. Understand? Now get the fuck out! This is our thing!"² Me is both awed and confused by the performance:

I respected that he didn't give a fuck. But I wish I hadn't been so scared, that I had the nerve to stand in protest. Not to castigate him for what he did or to stick up for the aggrieved white people. After all, they could've stuck up for themselves, called in the authorities or their God, and smote everyone in the place, but I wish I'd stood up to this man and asked him a question: "So what exactly is our thing?"

(SO, 287–88)

Me picks up on the comedian's phrase "our thing" to ask what qualifies as African American aesthetic expression. How can the comedian, Me wonders, draw a line between our thing and their thing? This is, I argue, also a literary question. Through Me, Beatty's novel joins a conversation best encapsulated by Kenneth Warren in his controversial but essential What Was African American Literature? There, Warren claims that African American literature as an aesthetic category existed only in relation to Jim Crow legislation. This is not to say that "racism has disappeared from the nation's sociopolitical landscape," but rather that African American literature was constituted as a dialectical "function of Jim Crow and the fight against it."³ With the end of de jure segregation and the ascendancy of de facto racism, the possibility for crafting a distinctly African American aesthetic vernacular in the contemporary moment, Warren argues, lacks a grounding referent.

Warren makes a political claim alongside his periodization of African American literature. Literature, Warren contends, provided the space "in which the black literary voice could count for so much because, in political terms, the voice of black people generally counted for so little."⁴ Warren argues that African American art is grounded in a reciprocal relation between the aesthetic and the political made possible by the obvious structural oppression of Jim Crow legislation. This is where Warren and Beatty diverge. While Warren laments the loss of a distinctly African American literature, Beatty, throughout The Sellout, critiques this idea of a stable African American literature having ever existed. The plot turns around Me's relationship to Hominy Jenkins, the former understudy of the Our Gang minstrel, Buckwheat, and the sole surviving "Little Rascal stunt coon" (SO, 71). Hominy sets off a series of events that eventually lead the narrator to being charged by the Supreme Court with "willfully ignoring the Fourteenth Amendment" and resegregating the fictional Los Angeles ghetto of Dickens while also possessing Hominy as a slave (SO, 23). In some senses, this regressive plotline seems to revolve around what Warren describes as a tired trope within contemporary literature wherein '"the discovery' [is] made again and again by recent scholarship, that despite news to the contrary, 'racism' still exists."⁵ But The Sellout doesn't merely uncover the racist bias of some minor character: by staging the segregation of Dickens and the reinstitution of slavery, Beatty goes much further than the "discovery" that '"racism' still exists."

The Sellout satirically erases not only the gains of the Civil Rights movement but imagines returning to chattel slavery as offering the only way out of the current racial impasse. The novel therefore critiques the politics of intelligibility that underpin Warren's idea of African American literature, which remain circumscribed within...