If you’ve been following my writing at all, then you know I was excited to see American Fiction, the newly released film adaptation of Percival Everett’s Erasure. I saw it, and wrote about it for JSTOR Daily. I hope that this is the first of many opportunities to talk about this amazing film and Percival Everett’s work.
The Indelible Lessons of Erasure
The trailer for American Fiction has dropped.
News about Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s Erasure has been circulating around for months now. Back when I was using Twitter regularly (sigh) I saw that Jefferson himself posted that the film was complete and they were looking to put it out soon. Since then, it’s garnered advance praise, and looks like it’s being pushed into the mix for major awards. Certainly, the cast looks incredible. Jeffrey Wright is a perfect choice for Thelonious “Monk” Ellison.
As I wrote in The Blackademic Life, Angela Bassett held the rights to the movie for several years, and was working on an adaptation under the title “Book of the Year.” An imdb page for it popped up, and a brief snippet about it appeared on the blog Shadow and Act, but that project never materialized.
These are exciting times for those of us who have been reading and writing about Percival Everett’s work. I’m curious to see how much more interest in his work will come out of this. I’m curious to see how he responds to the attention since he’s a notoriously reclusive writer. Every time I’ve seen him do public events he’s warm and gracious, but he just doesn’t do a lot of them, and has expressed his contempt for that side of the publishing game. Hell, Erasure itself is a commentary on how much he dislikes the commercial, promotional side of publishing. So we’ll see how he handles being in the spotlight. But just as a fan, it’s exciting and gratifying that more people will discover his writing now.
If you are interested in reading more about Erasure and its place in black literary history, I recommend the section “Real Compared to What?” in Chapter Five of The Blackademic Life: Academic Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual. I will have more to say about Erasure and American Fiction soon, and I’m looking forward to seeing the film as soon as I can.
For further reading on Everett, check out these two pieces I wrote on his work for The New Inquiry:
I have a new piece in The New Inquiry on Jay-Z’s 4:44 and Percival Everett’s So Much Blue. One of the things I like about writing for The New Inquiry is that they are open to this kind of experimental criticism. Check it out: “Some Blues But Not The Kind That’s Blue.”
“Percival Everett by Percival Everett”, my second essay for The New Inquiry, has just been posted. Click over there and check it out.
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.
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