Meta-Minstrelsy and Market Logics in Percival Everett’s James

Drawing from genre theory and theories of the literary marketplace, this article examines how Percival Everett’s James critically engages with the racialized expectations placed upon Black authors through its deployment of meta-minstrelsy and self-reflexive techniques. Central to the novel is a performative use of African American Vernacular English, which functions both as a diegetic survival strategy and as a metafictional commentary on the commodification of Blackness within white-dominated literary and publishing contexts. By situating its critique within the genre of the minor-character retelling, James extends the interrogation of racialized authorship first explored in Erasure, using intertextual cues to prompt readers to recognize the constraints imposed by genre conventions and market expectations. The novel further adopts a high-concept premise and a Hollywood-style revenge plot to expose the paradoxes of appealing to market-driven demands while resisting its ideological pressures. These strategies simultaneously attract and critique the logics of marketability, dramatizing the tension between resistance and complicity. The novel’s engagement with code-switching and meta-minstrelsy then reveals the absurdity of racial categories and the structural forces shaping literary production. Ultimately, this article argues that James reclaims the minor-character retelling as a genre capable of resisting commodification and articulating new forms of Black literary agency.