Lavelle Porter

When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong:  Racial Authenticity, Academia and the Black Intellectual in Percival Everett’s Erasure

This paper is part of a larger study on higher education in black American literature.  In particular I am interested in the “academic novel,” a genre defined by its fictional depictions of professors and university life.  More specifically I am interested in academic novels written by black writers (including Ishmael Reed, Samuel R. Delany and Paule Marshall).  One such novel is Percival Everett’s Erasure (1999) a satire that follows the life of Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a novelist and English professor. In the novel Ellison is confronted with the critical and commercial success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a work of “street fiction” which has captivated the publishing world.  Much to Ellison’s chagrin, the book has also found fans among his academic colleagues. Disgusted with the state of the black literary market Ellison decides to pen a satirical novel titled My Pafology under the penname Stagg R. Leigh.  Though it was written as a farce his novel unexpectedly becomes a hit and Ellison is forced to decide if he should reveal himself as its author.  My reading of Erasure is informed by two important critical works on the politics of authenticity in black American literature:  The Real Negro: The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature (2004) by Shelley Eversley, and Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance (1999) by J. Martin Favor.  Both works examine how the idea of authenticity has been bound up with black literature throughout the 20^thcentury.  With Erasure Percival Everett explores the troubling implications (and limitations) of racial authenticity, and the novel is aimed at dismantling the cultural and political currency that authenticity carries for the black intellectual inside and outside of the academy.

Lavelle Porter is a Ph.D. student in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.  A native of Meridian, MS, he holds a B.A. in History from Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA.  He is currently working on a dissertation on academic novels and the politics of the black intellectual. He also works as a New York City walking tour guide with Big Onion Walking Tours.