In “Black Women Readers in Erasure, A Contrapuntal Reading,” Joel Rhone will attend to the reparative politics at work in Everett’s Erasure. Showing that Black women readers are central to how Erasure issues its aesthetic and ethical judgments, he argues that it’s through Monk Ellison’s confrontations with them that the novel puts pressure on the conflation of his bourgeois pretensions with legitimate claims to artistic integrity. On this reading, Black women readers complicate the novel’s satirical critique of the commercial publishing industry, because they confront gendered, elitist, and anti-black hostilities to popular reading publics. These confrontations point up overlooked aspects of how the novel establishes its objects of critique, one of which is the misappropriation of aesthetic judgment by appeals to bourgeois sensibilities.

Brittany Edmonds will discuss a wider range of Everett’s work in “Percival Everett’s Protagonists.” She finds that generally, these protagonists are disappointed or disillusioned by the world, and Everett’s narratives provide ways of either explicating or alleviating that unrest. The fact of these protagonists’ blackness is rarely sociological. Instead, Everett’s casual deployment of black genius and black artistry serves many purposes: disrupting racial notions, unsettling intellectual elitism, offering slant commentary on various philosophical schools, demystifying erudition, and highlighting the importance of developing emotional and spiritual integrity. This presentation will investigate Everett’s figuration of black genius, arguing that the figure of the black intellectual is integral to Everett’s staging of broad formal, existential, cultural, and philosophical concerns in his fiction. This presentation will offer comment on So Much Blue (2017), Telephone (2020), Glyph (1999), and Assumption (2011).

Lastly, Irvin Hunt will take up “Black Kinship in the Work of Percival Everett.” Everett is known for his poststructuralist disruptions of language across artistic genres. He not only works multi-modally in oil paintings and nearly every genre of literature, but he also stages intertextual allusions from one modality of art to another. Signification, for Everett, is liquid. This paper explores what effect this interaction of genres has on our conception of Black social life, particularly kinship ties. Using the relationship between the father and son in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell as a lens, he reads the relationship Everett constructs between genres, modalities, characters, and real people—between what he calls water and blood. He posits that Everett’s voluminous body of work— two dozen novels, four collections of short stories, six collections of poetry, a children’s book, and series of self-portraits—asks us to radically rethink what constitutes kinship. Such defining components as lineage, the separability of biographical lives, of bodies, of geography, of the living and the yet to be born are thrown into relief across Everett’s corpus. What is kinship without the stability of these values? What takes their place? Everett is considered a writer interested less in the artifacts at the end of a creative process than in the process of creativity itself. This paper stretches that insight to reflect on the way Everett’s process-centered practice helps us rethink the ways in which we create kinship ties. Hunt brings Everett’s work into conversation with Black feminist thought around embodiment, domination, and sociality. This conversation draws out exciting implications for how we understand the limits and possibilities of Black social life.