Be on the lookout for “Percival Everett by Percival Everett,” my latest essay forthcoming in The New Inquiry.  

Reading through Conversations with Percival Everett in the process of writing that piece. I discovered this outstanding primary and secondary online bibliography on Percival Everett compiled by Joe Weixlmann and hosted by African-American Review, LINK. (And, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the secondary bibliography lists my dissertation chapter on Erasure.)

Below is an abstract for my upcoming talk at the NeMLA conference in Toronto on the panel “College in Crisis: Higher Education in Literature and Popular Culture.”  I’m particularly excited about this panel because it’s a rare opportunity for some face-to-face dialogue with other scholars of academic fiction.

“Academia and the Riddle of Race in Percival Everett’s Academic Fiction”

Though his work is often filed under the genre of “literary fiction” Percival Everett’s writing has bounded across an array of literary genres and themes. His first novel, Suder (1983) is the story of a black professional baseball player who is experiencing a batting slump and becomes obsessed with the music of jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. Among his other novels are Frenzy (1997) a retelling of the Dionysus myth set in ancient Greece, and God’s Country (1994) an American Western set in the 1870s. In this presentation I will examine Percival Everett’s work in academic fiction, a genre defined by its fictional depictions of universities, students and professors. In his 2001 satirical novel Erasure Percival Everett examines the significance of racial authenticity in black literary and cultural production, and explores broader questions about authenticity, art and cultural politics, while delivering a scathing satire of literary academia’s pretentious excesses. Everett’s novel Glyph, published in 1999 (and recently reissued by Graywolf Press in 2014) features a silent, highly intelligent baby named Ralph who is conversant in literary theory and carries on an interior monologue of insults directed at his parents.  Everett’s 2009 novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier includes scenes set at the historically black Morehouse College, featuring a professor named “Percival Everett” who teaches a class on “Nonsense,” and is critical of the college’s respectability politics. In all of these novels Everett engages, undercuts, ridicules and critiques academic discourses and racial logics. This presentation is part of a book project on academic novels and the politics of the black intellectual, and in this paper I will examine the ways in which Everett’s academic fictions generate provocative conversations about the role of black intellectuals in higher education, and the vexing history of race in American culture and literature.