Post-Black, Post-Huck, and Postmodern: The Dialogic Complexity of Percival Everett’s <em>James </em>(2024)

This article reads Percival Everett’s novel James (2024) within the context of several other works of “post-Huck” fiction that have responded directly to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. It finds that, among these novels, James is particularly interesting because of the extent to which it engages Twain’s novel in a critical dialogue of a kind that is well described by Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism in the novel. In so doing, James usefully supplements our understanding of Huckleberry Finn by including realms of experience that are excluded from Huck’s original narrative. In addition to this extension of the content of Huckleberry Finn, James also engages in some extremely productive dialogue with the famous colloquial style of Huck’s narration in ways that can be understood within the context of the African American practice of signifying but that can also be read within the context of Bakhtinian dialogism and Fredric Jameson’s notion of postmodern pastiche. However, because Everett does engage in such extensive dialogue with Twain’s novel, this pastiche is not of the “blank” kind associated by Jameson with the postmodern. Instead, it can be usefully read as pointing toward the “political form of postmodernism” that Jameson envisioned as a potential future movement beyond the postmodernism he was describing more than thirty years ago.