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Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction
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“‘Pleading Human’ in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout”
Gerald David Naughton
To cite this article: Gerald David Naughton (2022): “‘Pleading Human’ in Paul Beatty’s The
Sellout”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2022.2047879
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2022.2047879
© 2022 The Author(s). Published with
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Published online: 06 Apr 2022.
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“‘Pleading Human’ in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout”
Gerald David Naughton
Department of English Language and Literature, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar
ABSTRACT
This paper analyses Paul Beatty’s Booker Prize winning comic novel, The
Sellout (2015), as it relates to theories of black posthumanism, as outlined
in the work of Alexander Weheliye and Hortense Spillers. In the novel, the
protagonist – identied by his second name, “Me” – goes on trial at the
Supreme Court for violating the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments by
respectively owning slaves and reintroducing segregation. My article
explores a series of deeply troubling questions implied in the text, around
how black identity is constructed in Obama’s America, or in the country’s so-
called “postracial moment.” What if, in Beatty’s anarchic ctive universe,
black characters opted to become slaves, or masters, or segregated subjects?
What happens to our conception of post-civil rights progress and postracial
utopias when such choices are made, however satirically? I wish to consider
Beatty’s provocations around denitions of the human, as they intersect with
constructions of race (and postrace) – particularly in the light of recent
scholarship in black posthumanism. The article will draw on Weheliye’s
twin reframings of Giorgio Agamben’s delineation of bare life and Hortense
Spillers’s distinction between body and esh. The aim here is twofold – both
to consider the novel’s uses and abuses of humor (frequently characterized in
criticism as Beatty’s “black satire”) and to position the novel within the wider
frame of black posthumanism.
Introduction: “Pleading Human”
At the beginning of Paul Beatty’s comically anarchic Booker Prize winning novel, The Sellout (2015),
the black protagonist – identified in the novel by his second name, “Me” – is asked to enter a plea at his
Supreme Court trial. Accused of violating the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments by respectively
owning slaves and reintroducing segregation, Me considers what plea he should enter:
At the arraignment in district court right before the judge asked me to enter a plea, he read the list of felonious
charges against me. Allegations that in summation accused me of everything from desecration of the Homeland
to conspiracy to upset the apple cart just when things were going so well. Dumbfounded, I stood before the court,
trying to figure out if there was a state of being between “guilty” and “innocent.” Why were those my only
alternatives? I thought. Why couldn’t I be “neither” or “both”?
After a long pause, I finally faced the bench and said, “Your Honor, I plead human.” (15)
It is an intriguing set piece scene, used by the novel to stage the startling profanity of the questions
that The Sellout humorously poses: just how is black identity constructed in Obama’s America, or in
the country’s so-called “postracial moment” (Rossing 17)? What if, in Beatty’s anarchic fictive
universe, black characters opted to become slaves, or masters, or segregated subjects? What happens
to our conception of post-civil rights progress and postracial utopias when such choices are made,
however satirically?
CONTACT Gerald David Naughton gdnaughton@qu.edu.qa 3 Osprey Drive, Al Jazi Gardens, Building 115 Zone 65, Onaiza/
West Bay, Doha, Qatar
CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION
https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2022.2047879
© 2022 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
In “pleading human,” Me – also known in the novel as Bonbon – invites us to consider debates that
are now ongoing in race theory and posthumanist thought regarding the role that race and slavery
play, and have historically always played, in the construction of Western humanism. It is the
protagonist’s very humanity that is, literally, “on trial” throughout the novel, and his guilt or otherwise
amounts simply to making a final judgment on his racialized ontology. Whether through legacies of
racism or fantasies of postracism, Me is forced to find a means of defending his humanity against
challenges that would, to a greater or lesser extent, erase it – just as his hometown of Dickens is
“quietly removed” from the map to usher in waves of gentrification in LA (57). Though the answers
that Me provides to these tribunals are obviously more provocative than prescriptive, they are also an
invitation to reconsider narratives of progress and categories of the human.
In this article, I wish to consider Beatty’s provocations around definitions of the human, as they
intersect with constructions of race (and postrace) as put forward in recent scholarship in black
posthumanism. The article will draw on Alexander Weheliye’s twin reframings of Giorgio
Agamben’s delineation of “bare life and; Hortense Spillers’s distinction between body and flesh.
The aim here is twofold – both to consider the novel’s uses and abuses of humor (frequently
characterized in criticism as Beatty’s “black satire”) and to position the novel within the wider frame
of black posthumanism.
The Slave Plantation and “Dierent Genres of the Human”
In Homo Sacre (1998) Giorgio Agamben theorizes the various forms of human life that can be
legally defined and determined by state power. Agamben notes how systems of biopolitical power
create different categories of human life. While certain forms of human life are protected and
sanctified, these forms are shadowed by what he terms “bare life” (homo sacer) – humanity without
even the most basic of legal rights. People categorized as homo sacre are “included in the juridical
order solely in the form of its exclusion” (Homo Sacer 8). Historical examples of “bare life” can be
found most significantly at the site of inhuman suffering: in the concentration camp, or at other
twentieth-century locales of totalitarian mass murder. Drawing from this work, Alexander Weheliye
demonstrates how race throws up other forms and categories of “the human.” Weheliye explores the
question of what happens when the death camp is replaced with the slave plantation. If black
experience becomes the primary lens through which we explore the human as a genre, how must we
reconfigure our notions of what might constitute human and/or posthuman subjects? Weheliye is
just one of the scholars to have expressed concern at the Western academy’s move toward a post-
identity form of discourse that perversely silences analysis from minority or nonwhite traditions.
This has been a particularly troublesome aspect of theories derived from Foucault and Agamben.
According to Weheliye:
Bare life and biopolitics discourse in particular is plagued by a strong “anti–identity politics” strain in the Anglo-
American academy in its positioning of bare life and biopolitics as uncontaminated by and prior to reductive or
essentialist political identities such as race or gender. Supposing that analyses of race and racism are inherently
essentialist where those concerning bare life and biopolitics are not—because they do not suitably resemble real-
world identities—allows bare life and biopolitics to appear as unaffected by identitarian locality and thus as
proper objects of knowledge. (Weheliye, Habeas Viscus 7–8)
As a remedy for such assumptions, Weheliye advocates transposing the spatiotemporal context
for analysis to the racialized plantation. As Joanna Swanger notes, such a switch can illuminate “not
just the deprivations attaching to the experience of the plantation and the racializing assemblages
that proceed from it (and by which all of us are categorized), but the political possibilities that also
accrue” (307). What Weheliye is arguing here is that the whole notion of bare life and biopolitics is
inextricable from the background of race and slavery. If we truly accept the implications of this
position, the very definitions of human life, derived from Agamben’s theoretical framework, need to
be rethought.
2G. D. NAUGHTON
The second “switch” advocated by Weheliye is the Hortense Spillers-inspired movement from body
to esh. In the seminal “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” flesh emerges as
an alternate frame with which to view and unpick humanity’s multiple racialized connotations. Spillers
writes:
I would make a distinction in this case between “body” and “flesh” and impose that distinction as the central one
between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense, before the “body” there is “flesh,” that zero degree
of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of
iconography. (67)
Weheliye asks, “How might we go about thinking and living enfleshment otherwise so as to usher in
different genres of the human?” (Habeas Viscus 2–3). What he suggests is that “the flesh, rather than
the body displacing bare life or civil death, excavates the social (after)life of these categories: it
represents racializing assemblages of subjection that can never annihilate the lines of flight, freedom,
dreams, practices of liberation, and possibilities of other worlds” (Habeas Viscus 2). Beatty’s novel,
I want to argue, similarly “excavates the social (after)life” of slavery. In revisiting the traumas inflicted
on black life as bare life, the novel returns us to a consideration of enfleshment as a rejection of genres
of the human historically (and currently) applied to black life.
In the plantation slave system, as Weheliye has pointed out elsewhere, “black subjectivity appears as
the antithesis to the Enlightenment subject by virtue of not only having a body but by being a body –
within Enlightenment discourses blackness is the body and nothing else” (“Feenin” 28). Enfleshment,
conversely, elides “dehumanizing” restrictions of black embodiment that have persisted since the very
origin of the American slave system. It should be emphasized here that the point of such analytical
constructs is, of course, not to somehow restore the humanity of those racialized subjects who may
previously have been considered “not-quite-human.” Indeed, one of the most timely innovations of
recent work in black posthumanism has been to shift critical focus toward transformation of the very
category of humanism from within. In a 2014 introduction to a special issue on “Black Studies and
Black Life,” which he edited for The Black Scholar, Weheliye expands on this idea of transformation
from within:
Black life is that which must be constitutively abjected–and as such has represented the negative ontological
ground for the Western order of things at least for the last five hundred years–but can never be included in the
Western world order, especially the category of Man. Phrased differently, there can be no black life in the territory
of Western, humanist Man, which is why the existence of black life disenchants Western humanism. Claiming,
though not owning, the centrality of blackness to the creation of the Occident is as important as it is necessary for
the particular decolonizing critique developed within black studies. As Hortense Spillers and C. L. R. James have
shown along with a host of other theorists of black studies, to construe black life as a parochial, ethnographic
phenomenon rather than as “the history of Western civilization” or a “vestibular moment” in the engendering of
the West simply reaffirms the very colonial structures black studies sets out to trounce. (1)
In The Sellout, the protagonist’s literal decision to opt for segregation rather than false inclusion
demonstrates his immediate suspicion of coercion into a “parochial,” “vestibular” model of (post)
racial progress. His reintroduction of the plantation carries a similar air of non- participatory, albeit
insanely paradoxical, defiance.
What I wish to suggest here is that Beatty constructs the plantation as an ironic commentary on
traditional biopower in which “humanity” is commodified in such a way as to call into question its
very essence. Though Me/Bonbon wishes to “plead human” at his own trial, he refuses categories of the
human that those in authority would apply to him. At one point in his trial, the California attorney
general leaps to his feet to accuse him not only of “unabashed slaveholding,” but of an “abject violation
of the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871, 1957, 1964, and 1968, the Equal Rights Act of 1963, the
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, and at least six of the goddamn Ten Commandments”
(265). “If it were within my power,” he continues, “I’d charge him with crimes against humanity!”
(265). Here we find Beatty riffing on one of posthumanist theory’s more frequently mentioned
bugbears: namely, the universalist ideal of an ordinary and irreducible humanity underlying and
CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 3
legitimizing legal definitions of phrases like “human rights” or “crimes against humanity.” Such legal
constructs, arguably, do not succeed in addressing modes of “dehumanization” inherent in, for
example, the colonial enterprise, or in other forms of biopolitical racism. In the novel, the phony
accusation of “crimes against humanity” is met with an incompetent, albeit bizarrely apt, rebuttal from
the protagonist’s defense lawyer, Hampton Fiske:
“This is an example of my client’s humanity,” Hampton countered calmly, gently setting the fruit bowl on
the judge’s bench, then backing away with a deep bow. “Freshly picked from my client’s farm, your honor.”
Judge Nguyen rubbed his tired eyes. He selected a nectarine from the offering and rolled it in his fingers . . .
(265)
Here the African American protagonist’s humanity is “proven” by the produce taken from his
reenacted slave plantation. According to the comic logic of Beatty’s novel, the plantation serves as both
an inversion and a reflection of more familiar forms of biopower in which “humanity” continues to be
defined through its commodified status. Such rhetorical moves can only serve to make us question the
stability of human ontology.
Black Satire: “Humor Is Vengeance”
When the issue of his uses of the plantation is put to him in interviews, Beatty is typically
noncommittal:
I don’t know, I guess it comes from - I have, like, all these images of “Gone With The Wind” and all these other
movies - all these, you know, plantation movies in my head. And just the way that people relate to the antebellum
United States. I just thought it was funny, like, how this guy handled having a slave. Like, what does that mean? . . .
And, you know, it’s the discomfiture with what freedom is, what it entails, what responsibilities do you have.
(Simon)
Although Beatty would certainly appear to be acting coy in saying that he “just thought it would
be funny,” it is clear that humor is one of the important lenses through which we must read this
novel. Indeed, for many readers, the novel would be incomprehensibly offensive, if not for its
supposedly “satirical” texture. A brief synopsis of The Sellout would read like a litany of racial
offensiveness and counter progressive narrative. Me ends up before the Supreme Court for reinstat-
ing slavery on his farm and segregating the local middle school, which he makes “blacks only.” His
slave is an old man called Hominy Jenkins, who was once a childhood actor in the racist Our Gang/
Little Rascals series. Hominy deliberately chooses to become Me’s slave, and adjusts his behavior
and dialect to conform to an overwrought plantation type, lapsing into plantation dialect and
diction (“Damn, massa, these plums sho’ am good” [82]). The protagonist is a young African
American man born into the “agrarian” “ghetto community” (27) of Dickens, a neighborhood on
the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, who farms pot and artisanal watermelons. He is the son of
a single father who mercilessly conducts social science experiments on him, including “field
research” that involved sending him onto a busy street to cry for help, demonstrating “the bystander
effect as it applies to the black community” (29). Perhaps because of this upbringing, he becomes
“the sellout” of the novel’s title and develops what he calls “attachment disorder” (202), feeling like
an outsider in all racially charged situations, and developing a contrarian form of antipolitics. Two
events in Me’s life seem to confirm his outsider status. The first is the death of his father. The second
is the erasure through gentrification of Dickens, his small hometown. While the death of his
overbearing father leaves the protagonist with an identity crisis, the disappearance of Dickens
similarly “deprives him of a stable home and family, and some fixed “authentic” blackness”
(Afflerbach 225). Shortly after these events, Me’s farm becomes a slave plantation, and then on
a bus ride to celebrate Hominy’s birthday he places a “PRIORITY SEATING FOR WHITES” sign
that, perversely, rather than enraging passengers, instills in them a sense of purposeful belonging
(162). This leads him to the idea of re-segregating Chaff Middle School. As Reni Eddo-Lodge has
pointed out, “everything about The Sellout’s plot is contradictory.”
4G. D. NAUGHTON
Given the subject matter, we may conjecture that reviewers, while almost unanimously heaping
high praise on Beatty’s novel, also needed to somehow defuse its outrageous and discomforting
themes. Thus, the novel has been repeatedly and insistently touted as an example of “satire.” On its
release in 2015, its “satirical” quality was touted as its defining characteristic. The critical consensus
was immediate. It was described by Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal as “Swiftian satire of the
highest order” (Sacks), by Eddo-Lodge as a “whirlwind of a satire,” and by Michael Schaub as “the
first truly great satirical novel of the century.” his widespread focus on satire has also been a feature
of academic treatments of Beatty’s work. Darryl Dickson-Carr, in African American Satire: The
Sacredly Profane Novel, places Beatty’s work alongside other writers of what he terms “black satire”:
writing that exposes the incongruities of race in America. Such writing is united by a “few essential
characteristics: unremitting iconoclasm, criticism of the current status of African American
political and cultural trends, and indictment of specifically American forms of racism” (16).
Beatty himself, however, is famously very ambivalent about having his work labeled as satire. “I
don’t hate the word,” he claimed in one interview, “but I try to resist it because it’s so limiting . . .
When somebody says ‘satire,’ you think ‘Oh, it’s funny’ and stop there. But you don’t ask yourself
questions” (Gatti 44). Recent scholarship has insisted on the serious and unsettling implications of
the novel’s supposed satire. Elizabeth Anker insists that Beatty’s satire purposefully “violates race-
related taboos in order to confront readers with the avoidances that those taboos impose” (255).
Ian Afflerbach notes that “like all great satire, The Sellout aims to disturb its reader’s assumptions,
to provoke through a mixture of humor and unease . . . ” (228), and Steven Delmagori describes the
“satire” of the book as “the vehicle through which apparent jokes become rendered deadly serious,
[demonstrating] that the system is not apathetic, but defiant to resistance” (424).
Rather than be labeled as a satirist, Beatty positions himself within the tradition of the “black clown”
in literature: a “scapegoat and sage, unafraid to tell the world, as the Fool told Lear, ‘Truth’s that a dog
must to kennel,’ thus validating our humanity through our madness” (Beatty, Hokum 11, emphasis
mine). In this fusion of humor and humanity we find a way of unpicking the complex matrices of The
Sellout’s deliberately offensive comic style. As argued in the previous section, the entire construction of
the plantation as a biopolitical system of power is built upon deliberately categorizing black life as
a direct and necessary opposition to the concept of Western humanism. It is almost as if the ability to
riff on the plantation tradition – to (for want of a better word) “satirise” its cultural referents – is to
confound constructs of human and nonhuman. Moreover, as will be argued below, in setting the novel
in the “postracial” America of Barack Obama, rather than in a more historically conventional space of
antebellum America, Beatty demands that we as readers “ask ourselves questions” that should make us
feel uncomfortable.
One of Beatty’s consistent positions as an African American writer has been his expression of
frustration that most of the more prominent and heavily anthologized African American writers
seemed to him devoid of humor. With very few exceptions, he writes, “the defining characteristic of
the African-American writer is sobriety – moral, corporeal, and prosaic” (Hokum 11). In this regard,
Beatty reserves his particular ire for Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, writing which
he describes as “maudlin” and “miserable” (Hokum 8). He recounts his first encounter with Angelou’s
text as follows:
I made it through the first couple of pages or so before a strong sense of doom overwhelmed me and I began to get
very suspicious. I ventured another paragraph, growing ever-more oppressed with each maudlin passage. My lips
thickened . . . For a black child like myself who was impoverished every other week while waiting for his mother’s
bimonthly paydays, giving me a copy of that book was the educational equivalent of giving the prairie Indians
blankets laced with smallpox or putting saltpeter in a sailor’s soup. (Hokum 8)
Such writing is an anathema to a writer like Beatty, and this is more than a mere matter of
aesthetic taste. In the reference to “blankets laced with smallpox” he positions humor as a vital
component for literal survival.
CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 5
In 2008 Beatty edited an anthology of African American comic writing, in which he identified the
source of this humor as, in a word, “anger.” “African Americans,” he wrote in his introduction to
Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor, “like any other Americans, are an angry people
with fragile egos. Humor is vengeance. Sometimes you laugh to keep from crying. Sometimes you
laugh to keep from shooting . . . black folk are mad at everybody, so duck, because you’re bound to be
in someone’s line of fire” (16). Lisa Guerrero has similarly positioned anger as a characteristic feature
of African American humorists. “Black satire” she writes, “serves to both critique society and
legitimate black rage in a society that systematically invalidates black rage” (268). Jared Sexton has
noted this aspect of Beatty’s writing, seeing in it an expression of what he terms a “defense without
positive content” (Sexton and Colucciello-Barber). In the contemporary political landscape, Sexton
argues, protest is “absorbed,” rendered “ineffective”:
It makes you nostalgic for the days of good old-fashioned repression and co-optation (days which, of course,
never really existed in black), because at least then you knew you were on to something truly oppositional,
subversive, alternate. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, under such conditions, black (or blackened) artists are
drawn with some regularity to paradoxical ideas about fighting anti-blackness by over-identifying with its desire
to disappear or distort or disfigure blackness, essentially taking it over and enforcing it hyperbolically, satirically,
even vindictively. I think Paul Beatty’s literature has done this to great effect for twenty years or more—from
[The] White Boy Shue (1996) to The Sellout (2015). (Sexton and Colucciello-Barber)
L.H. Stallings has argued that Beatty’s writing is neither satire, nor critique, but rather
a performance of indeterminate blackness. Stallings argues that Beatty rejects terms like “post-soul,”
“post-black.” and “post-racial” (196), which seem attached to factitious periodizing concepts (i.e.,
configured as post–civil rights phenomena) and are inadequate in accounting for what is termed the
indeterminacy of blackness (190). What Beatty is arguing for, according to Stallings, is to “change
the trajectory of future discourses about race and racial identity” (190). We may recall, here, that
Weheliye has bemoaned the “plague” of “a strong anti–identity politics strain in the Anglo-
American academy” (Habeas Viscus 7). It may be tempting to conclude that the “satire” of The
Sellout is directed at a similar impulse toward “post-identity.” To label such writing so insistently as
satire, however, is to potentially miss Beatty’s multilayered, subtle and unpinnable aesthetic. The
poet, Tony Hoagland writes compellingly of Beatty’s comic brilliance. “Beatty has sardonic fun,” he
writes. His “poetic genius is how adroitly he plays with clashing layers of idiom and stereotype which
cross‑fertilize and cross‑examine both sides of the street, whiteness and blackness” (Hoagland 204).
In this image of “sardonic fun,” rather than “limiting” satire (Gatti 44), we may arrive at something
like Beatty’s own conception of his writing.
(Post)Satirizing Postrace
One of the most consistent targets of Beatty’s lacerating humor, in The Sellout and elsewhere, is the
faulty and self-congratulatory concept of “postracialism” that became popular at the beginning of
the twenty-first century. The term “postracial” implies somehow, a break with previous, “racialized”
eras, and that the concept of race ever somehow received closure – two concepts that are roundly
ridiculed in The Sellout. “Closure,” indeed, is the title of the final section of Beatty’s novel – a title
chosen, as he has acknowledged in interviews, with a deeply-rooted sense of irony (Gatti 47). The
book ends on the day President Obama was inaugurated in 2008. “It’s not Obama” Beatty has
pointed out in an interview: “it’s ‘the Black Guy.’ But that’s one of my favourite sections in the book,
actually. The book has this psychological framework, and so that bit’s called Closure – and of course,
there’s no closure” (Gatti 47).
Constructs of postrace, or of racial closure are the subjects of much ridicule in Beatty’s fiction. Toward
the end of the novel, it is recalled that the narrator’s father “never believed in closure,” which he believed
to be “a false psychological concept. Something invented by therapists to assuage white Western guilt”
(261). People believe that they have achieved racial closure, the novel seems to conclude, “when in reality
what they’ve achieved is erasure” (261). It is a conclusion that perversely echoes Hominy’s grateful
6G. D. NAUGHTON
emotional response to receiving his first beating as a slave: “seeking closure for centuries of repressed
anger and decades of unrequited subservience” (79). Both forms of “closure,” the novel seems to suggest,
are willfully self-annihilating. The novel’s end finds Foy Cheshire, a figure that Beatty uses to attack black
intellectual poseurs throughout the text, waving an American flag on Obama’s inauguration day and
declaring that “America had finally paid off its debts” (289). Me refuses to indulge in such sentiment:
“And what about the Native Americans?” he asks. “What about the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans,
the poor, the forests, the water, the air, the fucking California condor? When do they collect?” (289)
At the time, of course, Obama’s inauguration was supposed to embody “America’s post-racial
moment” – a specific cultural period in which tropes of transracialism and postracialism became the
loci of important national debate. Turner and Nilsen describes in The Colorblind Screen (2014) how
the clamor to embrace such tropes stems from a “dominant narrative that constructs the current post-
racial moment in contemporary race relations in the United States as the successful realization of
[post-Civil Rights era policies]” (195). Thus, as Sika Dagbovie-Mullins notes, the whole debate is
fueled by “a national fantasy of transcending race, or at least, with escaping the divisive and bad
feelings that dwelling on racial injustice seems to cause” (6).
To the protagonist of The Sellout, such “fantasies of transcendence” are inherently suspect. He
recounts reading a thinly veiled version of James McBride’s memoire, The Color of Water: A Black
Man’s Tribute to his White Mother, frequently held up as a key text for American postracial identity
(Naughton 347), and bridling with antipathy toward both its concept and its characterization:
“The Color of Burnt Toast,” I said, naming the bestselling memoir about the guy from Detroit with a “crazy” white
mother who didn’t want her biracial children to be traumatized by the word “black,” so she raised them as brown,
called them beigeoloids, celebrated Brown History Month, and, until he was ten years old, grew up believing that
the reason he was so dark was because his absentee father was the lightning-scorched magnolia tree in the
housing project courtyard. (142–3)
Me describes how he immediately fell in love with Marpessa, a black woman who grew up with him
in Dickens, at the precise moment that she declares her hatred of the book. “I’m so fucking tired of
black women always being described by their skin tones!,” she declares:
“Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-
fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe the white characters in relation to foodstuffs and hot
liquids? Why aren’t there any yogurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese-skinned, low-fat-milk white prota-
gonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That’s why black literature sucks!’” (143)
The implication for McBride’s book is brutal. Not only are its postracial pretensions held up to
derision, but Marpessa’s annoyance at the book’s penchant for food metaphors to describe skin tone
suggests that such postracial fantasies can often belie a fetishization of degrees of dark skin, themselves
presented as consumable commodities.
Similarly, the narrator of The Sellout scorns the idea of sanitizing racialized language, pointedly
claiming that Mark Twain’s infamously liberal use of the N word in The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn was “not enough” (97). As he listens to Foy Cheshire’s project of producing a series of “politically
respectful” versions of canonical American novels (including Huck Finn reconfigured as “The
Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His
Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit
[95]) the narrator feels again the connection between the attempt to erase traces of racism and the
potential consequence of racial erasure
I wanted to say more. Like, why blame Mark Twain because you don’t have the patience and courage to explain to
your children that the “n-word” exists and that during the course of their sheltered little lives they may one day be
called a “nigger” or, even worse, deign to call somebody else a “nigger.” No one will ever refer to them as “little
black euphemisms,” so welcome to the American lexicon—Nigger! (97)
CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 7
It could be argued here that in attacking the idea of postracialism, Beatty is guilty of choosing a soft
target. It perhaps should be acknowledged here just how far present debates have moved away from
this idea. “The term postracial,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, is now “almost never used in earnest”
(Coates). What Beatty’s attacks on such ideas do achieve, however, is an interesting and troubling
framing of how postrace and “postblackness” are actually implicated in the uncritical acceptance, not
only of racial progress, but of the very categories of humanity which could only exist with the advent
the biopolitics of plantations slavery itself.
Conclusion: Performing the Plantation
Hominy’s decision to pass back into slavery provides perhaps the most uncomfortably comic moment
of the novel. After a failed attempt to hang himself with a bungee cord, the former child actor is
cradled and consoled by the protagonist, Me. Asked why he has attempted suicide, Hominy smiles
a “minstrel smile” and begins to address Me as “Massa.” Me initially refuses the designation, objecting
“Hominy, you’re not a slave and I’m definitely not your master,” but it is of no use, as Hominy will
“simply use his freedom to choose slavery” (Astrada 114) . The whole issue of this perplexing “choice”
is obviously abundantly ironic, and Me is tjoroughly wrongfooted by Hominy’s odd logic:
“Massa,” he said, the smile evaporating from his face, and shaking his head in that pitiable way people who you
think you’re better than do when they catch you thinking that you’re better than them, “sometimes we just have to
accept who we are and act accordingly. I’m a slave. That’s who I am. It’s the role I was born to play. A slave who
just also happens to be an actor. But being black ain’t method acting. Lee Strasberg could teach you how to be
a tree, but he couldn’t teach you how to be a nigger. This is the ultimate nexus between craft and purpose, and we
won’t be discussing this again. I’m your nigger for life, and that’s it.” (78)
The scene is notable for its conflation of black authenticity and black performativity. Hominy’s
desire to be enslaved is connected both to his essential nature (“that’s who I am”) and his racial
assemblage (“the role I was born to play”). Me concludes that Hominy has become “unable to
distinguish between himself and the corny ‘I owe you my life, I’ll be your slave’ trope” (95), and at
this intersection between essence and trope, or between identity and performativity, the novel spirals
into its disturbing and humorous engagement with plantation fiction.
This is not the first time that Beatty has veered into the ironic concept of slavery as authenticity – or
of black authenticity as potentially a form of bondage. Early in Beatty’s first novel, The White Boy
Shue (1996), the narrator and protagonist Gunnar Kaufman relates the story of an ancestor of his,
Swen Kaufman, a free black man who had hoped to become a serious dancer and composer in
antebellum America. Reversing the tradition trajectory of antebellum slave narrative, Swen migrates
from Boston to slaveholding North Carolina. Watching African American slaves working in the field,
“the rise-and-fall rhythms of the hoes and pickaxes and the austere urgency of the work songs,” Swen
is inspired to write a “groundbreaking dance opera” (14). “Entranced with the possibilities” he joins
the slaves at work and thus becomes “the first person ever to run away into slavery” (13). In analyzing
the scene, Sinead Moynihan notes how “For Beatty . . . the quest for authenticity is itself a kind of
bondage” (124). This is as true for Hominy in The Sellout as it is for Swen in The White Boy Shue.
The pursuit of authentic black experience itself constitutes an assemblage, comprised of various
concepts of black performativity. Music, dance, acting and composing are drawn together in
a relationship that positions the black body in the territory of slave, or not-quite-human. Swen literally
jumps over “the wooden fence that separated the slave from the free” (White Boy Shue 13), and
Hominy similarly tethers his body to a post and demands to be beaten as a slave (Sellout 78).
To cement his (authentic and/or performative) identity as slave, Hominy is (at his own insistence)
brutally whipped by the protagonist, who notably “dissociates” himself from the action. Me had been
assigned a sort of unofficial community function of using his knowledge of developmental psychology
to help people like Hominy in their moments of crisis. It is a function inherited by Me from his father
who had been “known around town as the Nigger Whisperer” (30). On receiving his whipping from
8G. D. NAUGHTON
his new “master,” Hominy “like every slave throughout history, refuses to press charges” and pleads
with the townspeople not to judge Me “because, after all, who whispers in the Nigger Whisperer’s
ear?” (79)
“Hominy.”
“Yes, massa.”
“What would you whisper in my ear?”
“I’d whisper that you’re thinking too small. That saving Dickens nigger by nigger with a bullhorn ain’t never
going to work. That you have to think bigger than your father did. You know the phrase ‘You can’t see the forest
for the trees’?”
“Of course.”
“Well, you have to stop seeing us as individuals, ’cause right now, massa, you ain’t seeing the plantation for the
niggers.” (79–80)
Beatty’s high comic style here is again infused with some deeply uncomfortable and highly charged
debates around freedom, bondage, and black humanity. Hominy’s startling madness comes close to an
uncomfortable facet of the postracial moment. In cautioning the black protagonist to “stop seeing us as
individuals,” Hominy, while ostensibly uttering a quintessentially racist remark, also strikes at how the
Western construct of the human individual potentially erases the possibility for a fully articulated
black “human” individual. Given the failure of Western humanism to posit a coherent black life, or the
black individual beyond the plantation. Stating that Me “can’t see the plantation for the niggers” may
ultimately serve only to shed a light on how constructs of Western humanity are so intimately
connected to the very foundation of the plantation system itself. The plantation, in other words, is
already “in” the very ontology of the individual subject.
We should note, here, as Alexander Weheliye has, that “Afro-diasporic cultures provide singular,
mutable, and contingent figurations of the human, and thus do not represent mere bids for inclusion in
or critiques of the shortcomings of western liberal humanism” (Habeas Viscus 136, emphasis mine). And
this simple act of “not bidding for inclusion,” in essence, is the purpose of Beatty’s anarchic comedy.
Moreover, while the text follows Weheliye’s model by “not bidding for inclusion” in western human-
ism, it further follows Weheliye’s model in “not representing a mere critique” of western humanism.
This second aspect points, perhaps, to Beatty’s uneasiness with the label of satire. The point of a novel
like The Sellout is not critique, satire, or protest, but rather play. In Beatty’s odd, comic, and self-
defeating movement from inclusion in post-identitarian humanism to exclusion from it, we are invited
to enjoy the absurdity at the heart of the afterlives of slavery.
Acknowledgments
Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Gerald David Naughton is Associate Professor of American Literature at Qatar University. His research interests include
comparative American literature, postwar American fiction, and transnational literatures.
ORCID
Gerald David Naughton http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8544-6890
CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 9
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