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American novelist, poet, painter and scholar Percival Everett (*1956) is an exceptional pioneer in the field of African American literature. The extensive yet under-studied literary project of the black Los Angeles-based writer includes bitingly comical satires of race and its present-day realities, which are both socially insightful and theoretically challenging. This study presents a comprehensive portrait of the author, launching a comparative inquiry into three novels. In these texts, Everett intervenes in the academic, commercial and social debates on race by conceptualizing a self-help satire of critical uplift (Glyph), a parodic requiem for protest fiction (erasure) and a comedic origin narrative of a black billionaire (I Am Not Sidney Poitier). The central claim of this study is that they present race not as a problem of identity but of language and, thus, of reading (expectations). In picaresque plotlines and cross-sectional scenes, Everett sends centromarginal characters from initial situations of intellectual (Ralph, a mute but extremely smart infant writer), cultural (“Monk,” an experimental writer of Greek myths) and economic privilege (the oddly-named look-alike of the original Sidney Poitier) through absurd episodes of racial oppression. These contradictory, awkward and elusive black characters cannot be integrated into the dominant social and cultural frameworks. They are misrecognized and marginalized as not black, not black enough and both. Mirroring the structural mechanisms of racism, rendering visible its regressive force, they provide dehabitualized readings of racial normativity, in which race remains an imperative yet insufficient coordinate. ; Percival Everett (*1956) ist ein afro-amerikanischer Schriftsteller, Lyriker, Maler und Englischprofessor, dessen umfangreiches literarisches Werk bislang nur wenig wissenschaftliche Aufmerksamkeit genossen hat. Im akademischen und universitären Umfeld ist er durch satirische Romane über „Race“, soziale Ungleichheit und kulturelle Stereotypisierung ...
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