“[O]ne is lost to understand what this has to do with the [Black] experience”: Percival Everett, André Alexis, and Racialized Authorial Expectations

Abstract

Percival Everett and André Alexis have each affirmed their desire to produce art free from any external obligations by producing fiction designed to provoke and then to destabilize conditioned responses in their readers. One of the many ways in which both of them accomplish this aim is to write about subjects and in modes that confound what Lavelle Porter identifies as a host of “sloppy, simplistic, lazy, and inevitable” presumptions surrounding what Black writers should and should not write about. Both Everett and Alexis have written decidedly contemporary fiction that repurposes characters and plots from ancient Greek literature in various ways, including textual parody, metamythic pastiche, and conspicuous inclusion of Classical characters and forms into otherwise contemporary narratives. By doing so, they engage with a mythic tradition that a grossly reductive view on race and authorship perceives as not-theirs and navigate between a Scylla and Charybdis of cultural appropriation on one side and race treachery on the other. They not only explore their own aesthetic/philosophical interests through their renovations of Greek mythology, but they also hold up a mirror to the ways that the presumptions their readers bring with them affect (and limit) their interpretations.