Resistance and protest in Percival Everett's "Erasure"

Abstract

"As argued by the literary critic Margaret Russett, Percival Everett “unhinges ‘black’ subject matter from a lingering stereotype of ‘black’ style [and] challenges the assumption that a single or consensual African-American experience exists to be represented” (Russett 360). The author presents such a radical individualism in his most admired literary work published in 2001. In Erasure, Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, the main character and narrator of the book, pens a stereotypically oriented African American novel that becomes an expression of “him being sick of it”; “an awful little book, demeaning and soul destroying drivel” (Everett 132, 137) that caters to the tastes and expectations of the American readership but, at the same time, oscillates around pre-conceived beliefs, prejudices and racial clichés supposedly emphasizing the ‘authentic’ black experience in the United States." [...] (fragm.)