Calling Out the iNovel

Abstract

Abstract The chapter focuses on a first-person narrative written by Nicolas Fargues, a 50-year-old White male who provokes the readership and defies expectations by creating the literary voice of a Black female narrator. While the text invites affective and intellectual consensus around its scathing attacks on White privilege, closer scrutiny of its verbal surface and patterns reveals that this fictionalization of race, far from foregrounding the specificity of a Black female voice, satisfies the expectations of a White audience. Drawing on literary applications of linguistic anthropology, and focusing on the use of technology, the iPhone, and social media as loci of conversation, the chapter shows that Nicolas Fargues develops a form of White iWriting which merely ventriloquizes race as an aesthetic surfeit that ensures the book’s unquestioning reception and commercial success.