ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 looks at an alternative proposition of the black subject posited by Percival Everett. Unlike the other satirists discussed in the book who make the split between the black spectacle and the black subject a distinct one even as they are critically concerned with the impact of their interrelatedness, Everett suggests that perhaps there is no difference between the spectacle and the subject. How is black racial madness experienced differently when the struggle isn’t in keeping the spectacle and the self apart, but rather in accepting that the spectacle and the self are one and the same. My consideration of Everett looks at how questions of racial authenticity and black visibility present a conundrum for the black subject when the hyperreality of blackness within society seems to have consumed, in literal and commodified terms, any options for black subjectivity outside of itself. How do we begin to think of the “erasure” of the black subject under these conditions? The labyrinthine black satiric epistemology on display in Everett’s two novels place the reader within the confusion that characterizes a racial madness born from the search for “real” blackness and the painful realization that either it doesn’t exist, or you don’t exist.
