I Am Not a Race Man: Racial Uplift and the Post-Black Aesthetic in Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier

Abstract

Notoriously wary of publicity and traditional book circuits and conferences, Percival Everett is an enigmatic figure. Everett’s literary work endlessly signifies upon itself. Master storyteller and trickster, he is adept at telling tales that at once call attention to and away from the problems of race in America. His most well-known satire of American race relations, Erasure (2001), garnered renewed attention in the wake of the 2009 film version of Sapphire’s novel Push (1996),¹ but issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality permeate each of his eighteen novels, three collections of short stories, and two volumes of poetry. Everett’s reluctance to occupy a particular place in the African American literary cannon is one of the most defining features of his career. Everett makes no public pronouncements on behalf of African Americans or about American race relations and makes no claims to be able to divine the inner workings of the African American soul. In a 2007 interview with Canadian scholar Anthony Stewart, Everett announced that he doesn’t feel as if he has any responsibility to represent African Americans. In fact, he insists that they are impossible to represent as a whole (Stewart 2007: 303). Everett’s reluctance to identify himself as a spokesperson for African Americans is itself representative of a shift in black arts and letters that is characteristic of postmodern African American literature and indicative of a nuanced understanding of race and African American culture that characterizes the post-black aesthetic.