Hypervisible Man: Techno-Performativity and Televisual Blackness in Percival Everett's "I Am Not Sidney Poitier"

• Published in: Melus 2014-09, Vol.39 (3), p.135-154
• Main Author: Hayman, Casey
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; African American culture; African American literature; African American studies; African Americans; American literature; Blackness studies; Consciousness; Everett, Percival; Individual differences; Literary postmodernism; Moten, Fred; Movies; Novels; Performative utterances; Poitier, Sidney (1927-2022); Postmodernism; Race; Stereotypes; Subjectivity; Writing
• ISSN: 0163-755X; 1946-3170
• DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlu033

In this essay, I argue that the coming of age of Percival Everett’s protagonist Not Sidney Poitier in his novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) consists of his “becoming” Sidney Poitier, as he uses mass-mediated symbols of blackness as the raw material out of which to construct his own eclectic black subjectivity rather than identifying himself primarily in opposition to the spectacular (and often stereotypical) blackness represented by Poitier. In creating this character who must, by virtue of his name and appearance, constantly identify himself in opposition to the archetypal and iconic figure of Sidney Poitier and in using references to Poitier films as narrative building blocks, Everett reveals a profound truth about how black identity is articulated in the twenty-first century and elaborates a powerful strategy for resolving a post-identity politics crisis of black identity. In a society saturated with mass-mediated iconography of blackness, black people in America must elaborate their individual subjectivities within and against these spectacles of blackness. I attempt to complicate critical work on Everett and other so-called postmodern black artists that views their work primarily in terms of a defiant individualism. I argue for a strain of pragmatic collectivism in this text, claiming that the novel stages not merely a disintegration but also a reconstruction of black identity in which pop cultural representations of blackness are used to build a postmodern black identity that bridges the gap between individual and community.