Fugitive Language and Affective Aesthetics in Percival Everett’s James
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This paper examines how Percival Everett’s James (2024) reimagines Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into a neo-slave narrative through what I call fugitive language—a mode of expression that sustains both survival and the collective epistemology of the enslaved. By rewriting Twain’s minstrel dialect as code-switching and performative irony, Everett reclaims Jim as James, foregrounding him as an agent of linguistic and intellectual refusal rather than a mere foil for Huck’s moral awakening and comic relief. James demonstrates how fugitive language functions as a practice of self-making, collective knowledge production, and counter-discourse to the grammar of liberal personhood. The novel’s metafictional intertextuality not only rewrites Twain’s canonical text but also situates it within the literary tradition of slave narrative, a generative site of Black authorship. By using minstrelsy as both motif and metaphor, the novel explores the material conditions of enslavement that violently constrained Black literacy and creative expression. Everett’s intertextual engagements further interrogate the racist limitations of Enlightenment thought. Through satirical encounters with thinkers such as Locke and Voltaire, James exposes the racialized contradictions of liberal personhood and the enduring afterlife of slavery embedded within modern political thought. Finally, the paper argues that Everett extends fugitivity beyond epistemological critique into affective aesthetics. Reading scenes of grief and anger through Black aesthetics and affect, the paper demonstrates how Everett tends to unresolved historical trauma through affective excess, formulating an alternative grammar of redress and reparation through fugitivity, imagining anew in the afterlife of slavery.
Abstract
This paper examines how Percival Everett’s James (2024) reimagines Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into a neo-slave narrative through what I call fugitive language—a mode of expression that sustains both survival and the collective epistemology of the enslaved. By rewriting Twain’s minstrel dialect as code-switching and performative irony, Everett reclaims Jim as James, foregrounding him as an agent of linguistic and intellectual refusal rather than a mere foil for Huck’s moral awakening and comic relief. James demonstrates how fugitive language functions as a practice of self-making, collective knowledge production, and counter-discourse to the grammar of liberal personhood. The novel’s metafictional intertextuality not only rewrites Twain’s canonical text but also situates it within the literary tradition of slave narrative, a generative site of Black authorship. By using minstrelsy as both motif and metaphor, the novel explores the material conditions of enslavement that violently constrained Black literacy and creative expression. Everett’s intertextual engagements further interrogate the racist limitations of Enlightenment thought. Through satirical encounters with thinkers such as Locke and Voltaire, James exposes the racialized contradictions of liberal personhood and the enduring afterlife of slavery embedded within modern political thought. Finally, the paper argues that Everett extends fugitivity beyond epistemological critique into affective aesthetics. Reading scenes of grief and anger through Black aesthetics and affect, the paper demonstrates how Everett tends to unresolved historical trauma through affective excess, formulating an alternative grammar of redress and reparation through fugitivity, imagining anew in the afterlife of slavery.