Long one of America’s most respected literary novelists, Percival Everett has achieved even greater prominence in recent years, especially with his receipt of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 2024 novel James, a brilliant revisionary retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The bestselling James can be described as a postmodern pastiche of Huckleberry Finn, but one that overcomes the political inertness of postmodern pastiche influentially described by Fredric Jameson through the sheer power of its anti-racist message[1]. Actually, though, Everett has been producing such pastiches for decades, using them to engage in subversive dialogues with a variety of aspects of the representation of blackness in American culture. At the heart of Erasure (2001), for example,is an extended pastiche of the “ghetto novel” that lampoons cultural expectations of “authentic” black literature. Everett has also taken on more mainstream genres, as in his pastiche of the Western in God’s Country (1994) or his detective story pastiche in Assumption (2011), and his pastiche of James Bond films in Dr. No (2022). Meanwhile, some of the most striking examples of postmodern pastiche in all of Everett’s work occur in his 2009 novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier, which engages with the films of Poitier to produce both high comedy and serious satirical investigation of the question of black identity in America.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier is riotously funny; it also reads very much like a postmodern metafictional game, many of its narrative segments having been transparently constructed from bits and pieces of Poitier’s films, rather than as representations of reality. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that this novel is light fun or only about itself. Poitier occupies a unique position in African American cultural history, and Everett’s use of his work (and his overall image) comments on that position in important ways. The protagonist and first-person narrator of I Am Not Sidney Poitier is literally named “Not Sidney Poitier,” though he is less an actual character than a sort of textual operator. Indeed, one of the key driving forces behind this novel is his lack of any real identity. Not only is he literally not Sidney Poitier, but he also fails to adhere to any of the stereotypical identities offered to African American men in American culture, making it difficult for him to maintain any identity at all.
Not Sidney’s name leads to a seemingly endless string of Abbott and Costello style bits, in which Not Sidney typically only further confuses individuals who are perplexed by his name, a confusion that is furthered by the fact that he is repeatedly stipulated to look exactly like Sidney Poitier—despite the fact that Not Sidney is roughly eighteen years old in most of the story, which occurs at a time when the actor would have been in his early seventies. But, of course, it is not the real Sidney Poitier to whom Not Sidney is repeatedly compared in the novel, but the idealized celluloid image of the actor. In any case, the story of Not Sidney’s development from his unlikely two-year gestation to early manhood is anything but the typical Bildungsroman story of an individual growing to become his or her true adult self; his story is more an exploration of the ways in which cultural artifacts such as the films of Poitier contribute (or don’t contribute) to the identities of people (especially black people) in general. Not Sidney’s growth ultimately leads not to maturation and stability but to the dissolution of his identity altogether, in good postmodern fashion. However, the issue of Not Sidney’s ill-defined identity is treated in ways that call attention to race and thus move beyond the usual realm of postmodern metafictional play. Still, we would argue that the engagement with Poitier’s films in I Am Not Sidney Poitier can very usefully be read within the context of Jameson’s theorization of postmodern pastiche and psychic fragmentation, even if their focus on racial issues clearly endows them with a critical political force that Jameson would deny to most postmodern culture and even if this focus reminds us that the “postmodern” experience is not the same for all individuals.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier and the Political Form of Postmodern Pastiche
Numerous theorists have attempted to classify the different ways in which one text mimics or transforms another, though I Am Not Sidney Poitier (partly because it is a novel that draws upon films, rather than other novels) does not completely conform to any of the classifications that have been proposed. In his study of various forms of parody, Simon Dentith notes that the most comprehensive classification scheme of this type is the one proposed by Gerard Genette in Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), which describes such types as parody, travesty, transposition, pastiche, skit (or charge) and outright forgery (11). Of these, I Am Not Sidney Poitier corresponds most closely to travesty, which for Genette transforms the source text with satirical intent, though Genette’s characterization of travesty does not well encompass the way Everett’s novel directs its satire, not at Poitier’s films, but at their social function. The novel also contains a straong metafictional elements: it conducts, not just a satirical critique of the representation of race in America, but also a commentary on the construction of fiction in general[2].
Linda Hutcheon, meanwhile, sticks mostly to distinguishing between parody and pastiche, which is fairly typical in the critical tradition. In particular, she reviews the work of a number of previous theorists to conclude that parody seeks to differentiate itself from its source, allowing a critical engagement, while pastiche “operates more by similarity and correspondence,” sticking largely to imitation. In addition, she argues that one difference between pastiche and conventional parody is that the former often draws upon entire genres for its stylistic models, while parody more commonly targets individual texts or authors (38). Finally, she pays significant attention to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, for whom parody of earlier works is a key to the dialogic texture of the novel as a genre. Bakhtin views parody as neither mere imitation nor mere mockery but as an “intentional dialogized hybrid” in which “languages and styles actively and mutually illuminate one another” (Bakhtin 76).
For his part, Dentith is less interested in categorization, arguing instead for a broad conception of parody that encompasses a spectrum of approaches that covers a wide variety of types of literary imitation and attitudes toward source texts. This approach, of course, puts Dentith somewhat at terminological odds with Jameson, who draws a sharp distinction between the kind of parody that can have considerable critical force and postmodern pastiche, which does not. Jameson’s theorization of postmodernism is based on the fundamental insight that postmodern culture is the kind that is produced in a society in which the historical process of capitalist modernization is essentially complete, with virtually every aspect of life (including culture) penetrated and dominated by the logic of commodity production. As a result, cultural products become commodities like any other, and “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally” (Jameson, Postmodernism 4). As a result, postmodern culture is so ideologically aligned with late capitalism that it becomes the “cultural logic of late capitalism” with little ability to mount an effective critique of capitalism. Postmodern artists thus construct their texts largely through techniques of “pastiche,” by which Jameson means the tendency of postmodern artists to borrow liberally from both the style and content of earlier works in a “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past” that does not engage the source texts in any sort of critical dialogue. For Jameson, postmodern pastiche is,
like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse. (Postmodernism 17)
Granted, Jameson’s insistence on the “blank” nature of postmodern pastiche might make it seem perverse that we prefer the term “pastiche” to “parody” to describe Everett’s engagement with Poitier’s films, even though that engagement is clearly not blank but contains a significant critical/satirical impulse that is more like the dialogic parody of Bakhtin. However, it is precisely the “dialogized” nature of Everett’s pastiche that we wish to highlight in order to indicate that Everett’s novel, seemingly a quintessential work of postmodern fiction, does indeed move beyond Jameson’s model of postmodernism in this sense. For that matter, the same might be said for much of Everett’s other work as well—as well as for a number of other recent novels, from the mimicry of the hard-boiled detective style in Lavie Tidhar’s raucous sendup of Hitler in the alternate history novel A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), to the use of the tropes of the Western genre in Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance (2019), to Anna Biller’s radical feminist reinscription of the Gothic romance in Bluebeard’s Castle (2023). We choose to use “postmodern pastiche” to describe such novels, including I Am Not Sidney Poitier, precisely to call attention to the fact that they go beyond Jameson’s model of postmodern pastiche, perhaps signaling a new turn in the development of postmodernism itself.
One might, of course, argue that this new turn marks these texts as something other than postmodern. Indeed, there has been much discussion in recent years of whether postmodernism might have run its course and is already passé, including the argument by Ramón Saldívar in 2011 that Everett’s writing (especially in Erasure) is an example of a “speculative realism” that he believes moves beyond postmodernism[3]. However, if one accepts Jameson’s characterization of postmodernism (in the sense of the “high” postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s) as the cultural logic of late capitalism (as we do), then there is no reason to believe that we have entered an entirely new cultural era, given that late capitalism still reigns supreme. Instead, we might simply be entering an era in which late capitalism has reached such an extreme neoliberal form that it is beginning to show its contradictions, cracks, and fissures, facilitating the production of cultural works that might explore these faults more effectively. The fact that texts such as I Am Not Sidney Poitier go beyond Jameson’s vision of pastiche as blank parody does not, therefore, render Jameson’s analysis outdated but rather demonstrates its ongoing relevance and usefulness as an optic through which to view postmodern literature.
Jameson himself addresses this issue in a 2016 interview with Baumbach,, et al., when he suggests a distinction between the aesthetic “postmodernism” of the 1970s and 1980s (a phenomenon that is probably now a thing of the past) and “postmodernity” as an historical period that is still going strong. He even goes so far as to note that, in terms of writing, one thing marking the end of “postmodernism” is that, now, “everybody’s political” (144). Then again, Jameson himself had imagined, back in his 1991 Postmodernism book, that a “political form of postmodernism” might eventually appear, and that this new form of postmodernism would likely “have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale,” allowing individuals better to understand their place in the world system of late capitalism (Postmodernism 54). We would suggest that separating “postmodernism” from “postmodernity” probably only confuses things further and would propose referring to the postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s as a “high” postmodernism that was only the first phase of the development of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism, a development that continues today.
Everett’s Narrative Segments as Pastiches of the Films of Sidney Poitier
Keith Mitchell and Robin Vander argue that Everett has “made a career out of writing against the proscriptions of black representations in his fiction” (xiii). And black representation is certainly the key issue in I Am Not Sidney Poitier, whichdraws upon the films of Poitier in a way that clearly questions Poitier’s cultural status as a role model for African American men. This critique, though, is aimed not at Poitier or his films so much as at the limited ways American culture offers such models. As Demirtürk rightly notes, Everett’s “parodies” of Poitier films constitute a political statement on the inability of Hollywood film to offer any viable identities to black audiences through their failure to represent black experience in anything other than safely circumscribed ways (87). Moreover, the critique extends further to examine the whole notion of “African American” identity and to question whether race alone should be the dominant factor in determining anyone’s identity. It is in this sense that Christian Schmidt has categorized this novel as an example of “postblack” literature or that Saldívar sees the aesthetic of Everett’s writing (in his case referring especially in Erasure) as “post-racial.”
To understand the project of I AM Not Sidney Poitier it is helpful first to review the exact nature of the engagement of the novel with Poitier’s films. In the first chapter, Not Sidney explains the seemingly odd conditions under which he was born, the product of two years of gestation in what was originally thought to be a hysterical pregnancy. And, while Not Sidney himself casts some doubt on this story, it does have much of the quality of Menippean satire that will run throughout the novel (and throughout much of Everett’s fiction)[4]. This chapter does not seem to be overtly based on any of Poitier’s films, partly because Poitier was not a child star and Not Sidney is still only eleven when his mother dies and he is taken in by none other than Atlanta media mogul Ted Turner, under whose (rather distant) stewardship he grows to early manhood. However, many of the circumstances in which the young Not Sidney and his mother find themselves resonate with the basic scenario of Daniel Petrie’s 1961 film A Raisin in the Sun, based on the play of the same title by Lorraine Hansberry. In the film, a black Chicago family, struggling to rise from poverty, receives a $10,000 life insurance settlement upon the death of the father, then lost most of it but eventually manage to make a down payment on a house in a white neighborhood where their black family is clearly not welcome but where they ultimately decide to try to make a go of it. In I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Not Sidney’s mother receives a $30,000 insurance settlement, but she wisely invests it in Turner’s fledgling media company, ultimately becoming quite wealthy as that company grows into Turner Broadcasting System and becomes a major force in the expansion of American cable television in the 1980s. Not Sidney inherits her stake in the company and is thus quite wealthy in his own right, growing ever wealthier as he grows to adulthood under the guidance of Turner—and thus also growing further away from the identities stereotypically offered to African American men. Thus, while the engagement with A Raisin in the Sun is distant and somewhat indirect, the dialogue of this first chapter with that film already indicates the tendency of I Am Not Sidney Poitier to challenge the very limited representation of black life in American culture in general and in Poitier’s films in particular. Meanwhile, the surprising (and hilarious) appearance of Turner, a prominent figure in American culture in the 1980s and 1990s indicates the ways in which this novel’s engagement with American culture will go well beyond the films of Poitier.
Not Sidney’s upbringing as Turner’s ward in this chapter also includes his tutelage by Betty, a radical Spelman College student, hired by Turner, who teaches him about
Marx and Lenin and Castro and the ills of American democracy and the fall of the Roman empire and about how the British lost their empire because they were likely as not to stand around in sheer amazement upon recognizing that they were not loved by their colonized peoples. She taught me that America preached freedom yet would not allow anyone to be different. (9)
This message seems to make little impression on Not Sidney, and Turner seems basically to endorse Betty’s ideas, somewhat to her confusion, given her view of him as the Enemy. The pastiche here, then, is not of Poitier’s films but of precisely the radical kind of messaging that his politically safe films were sometimes criticized for avoiding. But this messaging, here, seems like empty posturing that serves no real purpose, perhaps even more so after Betty secures her Spelman degree, marries a graduate of Morehouse College and moves to Akron to pursue a comfortable middle-class life, suggesting that the radicalism of her student days was largely performative. In this sense, then, the “Betty” episode acts as a counter to much of the rest of the novel, making it clear that the goal of I Am Not Sidney Poitier is, not to make us dismiss Poitier’s films, but simply to ask us to rethink those films and their place in American cultural history.
The second chapter of I Am Not Sidney Poitier launches into a full-blown pastiche of Poitier’s films as Not Sidney, now a young adult, decides to drive cross-country from Atlanta back to his native Los Angeles, only to be accosted by a spectacularly stereotypical racist cop, winding up imprisoned and then escaping and going on the run while chained to a white fellow prisoner named Patrice. Everett thus evokes the basic scenario of one of Poitier’s best-known and most immediately recognizable films, Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958). Again, however, Everett does not merely mimic the film; he rewrites it significantly. Not Sidney’s ironic and irreverent narrative voice sets his story strongly apart from the ultra-serious tone of the film, just as his character differs dramatically from Poitier’s poor, angry, and unjustly convicted black man. At the end of The Defiant Ones, Poitier’s Noah Cullen nobly sacrifices an opportunity to escape in order to stay behind and care for Tony Curtis’s injured John “Joker” Jackson, with whom he has established a strong bond, overcoming their initial mutual animosity. In Everett’s novel, though, no such sacrifices are made: Not Sidney happily leaves his white partner behind.
Meanwhile, Jackson’s love interest, the blind “Sis,” differs significantly from the unnamed female lead of The Defiant Ones. In fact, she does not correspond to that character at all but seems to have been borrowed from a different Poitier film entirely, having been based primarily (but ironically) on Selina D’Arcey (Elizabeth Hartman), the blind female lead of Guy Green’s A Patch of Blue (1965). In that film, Poitier plays Gordon Ralfe, an educated black man who represents the other side of Poitier’s filmic image—the black man who has succeeded in a white man’s world while playing by the white man’s rules. Meanwhile, he displays the typical rectitude of Poitier’s characters and chastely resists Selina’s romantic advances in favor of getting her into a school for the blind, where she can receive the education she had previously been denied.
At one point, the narrative of this second chapter is interrupted by an extended dream sequence that surprises even Not Sidney, who at one point starts wondering, within the dream, “what I was doing there as Raz-ru and what I was doing in this dream that certainly could not be my own” (68). His Raz-ru, meanwhile, is clearly a version of the dignified and educated slave Rau-ru played by Poitier in Raoul Walsh’s Band of Angels (1957). With this sequence, Everett addresses the African American ur-topic of slavery, but in an extremely indirect and even comic way, thus continuing his career-long joust—epitomized by Erasure—with those who have complained that his writing is somehow not “black” enough. At the same time, this dream sequence also serves as a reminder of the extent to which, the negation built into his name notwithstanding, Not Sidney’s mind has been colonized by the image of Poitier. And, of course, by extension, this sequence comments on the impact of Poitier on the African American consciousness (and subconsciousness) as a whole.
Chapter 3 veers away from the pastiche of Poitier’s films and into what is largely a campus satire aimed at the reverence with which HBCUs such as Morehouse (which Not Sidney attends in this chapter) are regarded in the African American community. Sidney’s principal academic engagement at Morehouse occurs in connection with an English Department course tellingly entitled “Philosophy of Nonsense,” taught by “some guy named Percival Everett,” who tends to speak as if he has just escaped from an absurdist comedy (87). And we are clued into the nature of this Professor Everett early on when Not Sidney visits Everett’s office to get permission to take his class, finding the office cluttered with sports paraphernalia and his wall festooned with portraits of a triumvirate of Everett’s ostensible heroes. On one level are side-by-side photos of James Joyce and Terry McMillan, which makes a certain sense, given that Joyce, like Everett, was also a master of satire and pastiche and that McMillen is also a prominent African American novelist. In addition, while McMillen’s novels are very different from Everett’s, she has been widely quoted (including in the front matter to I Am Not Sidney Poitier) as declaring Everett to be a “brilliant writer.” Not Sidney, though, has a different opinion of his Everett, describing him to Turner as “an idiot” who “admits to being a phony” (116).
This Everett, in fact, is a somewhat clownish figure, as is verified, not only in his own behavior and statements, but by the third portrait that hangs in his office, above those of Joyce and McMillan and thus presumably in a position of higher honor. This portrait is of one “Pinto Colvig,” whom Everett describes as a “genius” and as “one of the great artists and thinkers of our time” (88). Then, Everett explains to a puzzled Not Sidney that Colvig was the first Bozo the Clown (as indeed he was, having portrayed Bozo as a voice actor on a children’s album released in 1946 and as a live actor on television in 1949, well before the more famous Larry Harmon assumed the role in 1957)[5].
Chapter 4 features perhaps the most recognizable pastiche in the novel as Not Sidney travels with his girlfriend Maggie (who is black, but light-skinned) to visit her family for Thanksgiving. The pastiche here of Stanley Kramer’s 1967 classic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, possibly Poitier’s best-known film, is obvious. In the film, Poitier’s character, Dr. John Wade Prentice, has met a white woman, Joanna Drayton (Katharine Houghton), who takes him home to meet her parents, played by Hollywood legends Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The Draytons are a very liberal-minded (and nominally anti-racist) couple but are still a bit concerned about the prospects of an interracial marriage between Prentice and Joanna, despite the fact that Prentice is a man of almost superhuman accomplishments and moral purity. Of course, interracial marriage was still a sensitive and controversial topic in 1967, so much so that the race issue completely overwhelms any possible concerns over the fact that Prentice is thirty-seven, while Joanna is only twenty-three, or the fact that they are moving toward marriage after having known each other only ten days. All is well in the end of course, and everyone in the film (especially Prentice) ends up behaving terribly righteously.
Everett has a great deal of fun with all this righteousness, though, as Maggie’s light-skinned parents are horrified by Not Sidney’s dark skin—until they discover that he is filthy rich, at which point their attitude changes dramatically. Meanwhile, the chapter features inserted characters who are not in the film—such as Maggie’s sexually aggressive sister Agnes and Jeffrey, the idiot albino son of a black clergyman whose family joins them at dinner. In fact, the thoroughly raucous tone of this entire episode differs so dramatically from that of the film that a certain mockery of the priggish rectitude of the film is surely intended.
This chapter also includes another dream sequence of sorts, though this one occurs, not when Not Sidney is literally sleeping, but when he swoons with pleasure while receiving skillfully delivered oral sex from Agnes. In this “dream,” Not Sidney envisions himself as a “young doctor with a Bahamian accent” who is attacked by a vicious, gun-toting racist who fires his weapon at Not Sidney just as Not Sidney is metaphorically firing his own. The reference to Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1950 film No Way Out (the screen debut of the young Poitier) is quite clear, even though many of the details are changed. Again, that Not Sidney’s mind would drift into a Poitier film at such an intense moment makes clear just how much of his mind has been constructed from these films.
In the fifth chapter of I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Sidney again sets out to drive from Atlanta to Los Angeles, reaching the town of Smuteye, Alabama (a real town) before having to stop due to car trouble. There, he encounters a group of Pentecostal women who are obviously a parody version of the righteous German nuns encountered by Poitier’s Homer Smith in Ralph Nelson’s Lilies of the Field (1963). However, whereas Smith turns out to be an expert craftsman and actually succeeds in building a chapel for the nuns, Not Sidney doesn’t know how to build anything. Instead, he decides to help the women build a church by donating $50,000 to their cause, though this action turns out to be significantly more complicated than he had expected, sending him into a series of comic misadventures with the redneck inhabitants of Smuteye that anticipates the satirical depiction of the denizens of Money, Mississippi, in Everett’s The Trees (2021). As in that novel, though, the humor can deal with dark moments, including Not Sidney’s witnessing of a Klan rally, describing its participants as the “snaggletoothed spawn of aging grand dragons” (195). The action is also again punctuated by a dream, this one derived from the 1972 Western film Buck and the Preacher, which has the distinction of being the first film directed by Poitier, as well as starring both Poitier and fellow black superstar Harry Belafonte. This film, while including a number of comic touches, also features abject violence perpetrated against freed black slaves by vicious white racists, thus rhyming with that Klan rally. Some of this violence from the film filters into the dream, continuing the tendency of Not Sidney’s Poitier-induced dreams to be darker and more violent than the events of his own life, though this one ends with somewhat comic violence as Not Sidney is punched in the face by a preacher, just as Poitier’s Buck is punched in the face by Belafonte’s preacher at a key moment in Buck and the Preacher.
Chapter 6 is a continuation of Chapter 5 and so is still related to Lilies of the Field, though now Not Sidney finds himself arrested for murder and then asked to assist in finding the real killer in ways that directly draw upon the events of Norman Jewison’s 1967 Oscar-winning film In the Heat of the Night. Indeed, at one point Not Sidney even replicates Poitier’s famous “They call me Mr. Tibbs!” line from that movie when Not Sidney declares, “They call me Mr. Poitier!” The highlight of this chapter, though, might be the reappearance of Turner and Everett, now functioning almost as a sort of deadpan comedy team, who come to Smuteye to help Not Sidney win his freedom. This chapter also features a car chase that might have been derived from Gordon Douglas’s They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970), the somewhat lackluster sequel to In the Heat of the Night.
The brief final chapter of I Am Not Sidney Poitier does not reference a specific Poitier film, simply detailing Not Sidney’s decision to fly to Los Angeles to avoid any additional road-trip mishaps. This chapter is, however, very much the culmination of the events of the earlier chapters. In Los Angeles, Not Sidney visits his childhood home and finds that he no longer feels connected to it. Then, he attends an awards ceremony at which Belafonte hands Poitier a statuette signifying his status as the “Most Dignified Figure in American Culture,” thus providing one last satirical jab at Poitier’s reputation for epitomizing officially endorsed standards of conduct and righteousness[6]. The kicker, though, is that Sidney Poitier and Not Sidney seem by this time to have merged into a single figure, the cultural power of the actor’s image having apparently overwhelmed Not Sidney’s sense of a separate identity.
This lack of an identity apart from his relationship with Sidney Poitier can be taken as a sign of the ways Hollywood and other elements of the American Culture Industry had offered few other alternatives than the sanctioned vision of Poitier as an emblem of acceptable black identity, an image first established through his portrayal of characters who were “non-funky, almost sexless and sterile” in his films of the 1950s and 1960s and never fully overcome in his later films[7] (Bogle 175–76). I Am Not Sidney Poitier is largely a critique of the limited range of images of African American male identity conveyed in American culture other than the very safe one that was conveyed in Poitier’s films, films that, as Sharon Willis has noted, projected a “fantasy of racial understanding and ‘assimilation’ that requires no effort on the part of white people” (5). In short, Poitier’s idealized image was that of the unthreatening African American who could be perceived as admirably ideal from a white perspective. And, of course, this image was so powerfully conveyed that it sometimes overwhelmed the reality of Poitier the real human being and even impeded his ability effectively to portray characters in films, making audiences very much aware that they were watching Poitier rather than watching his characters. As Willis puts it, “To the extent that both his casting and his roles depend on and reinscribe his iconicity, he is always playing himself” (24). In short, audiences have trouble distinguishing between Poitier and his image or between Poitier and his characters, suggesting the confusions of identity with which I Am Not Sidney Poitier is centrally concerned.
I Am Not Percival Everett and Black Identity
In a 2014 article, Casey Hayman calls I Am Not Sidney Poitier Everett’s “most explicit elaboration to date of this paradox at the heart of postmodern black American identity as lived experience, whereby the individual and the communal can only be bridged by a performance of identity within and against mass-mediated and often stereotypical popular iconographies of blackness” (136). Drawing on James Baldwin, Hayman goes on to note that, in this novel, Everett’s “referential focus through the figure of Poitier serves to be more than a nihilistic postmodern diversion from reality; instead, this intertextuality is a means to ‘smuggle’ some complex truths about the lived experience of black subjectivity into the mass-mediated scripts of blackness proffered by a postmodern society” (140).
When Not Sidney first arrives at Morehouse in Chapter 3, he attends a convocation that is designed to promote the status of the college as a sacred monument to African American learning. There, the gathered attendees are addressed by “a vice president of something or other” at the university, who begins by reminding his audience (accurately) of some of the prominent figures from various fields who have graduated from Morehouse, including “the Doctor Reverend Martin Luther King Junior and Edwin Moses, Maynard Jackson and Spike Lee, Howard Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson” (95). The main speaker at this convocation, though, is none other than “Doctor William H. Cosby Junior,” introduced as someone who “has done much to uplift the race. He was the first black man on television to carry a gun. He is a gentleman, an actor, a comedian, an author, and above all else, an educator. You all know him from television, but we know him as a friend” (96). That Bill Cosby’s list of achievements here would begin (erroneously, actually) with a notation of his status as the “first black man on television to carry a gun” already suggests a certain irony in this heroization of Cosby. It is presumably a reference to the fact that he regularly carried a handgun in the series I Spy (1965–1968), in which he co-starred with Robert Culp, thus becoming the first black actor to have a headline role in a prime-time network series. Cosby also became the first black actor to win a Primetime Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Drama Series for this role. In fact, he went on to win that award three times for I Spy, so that carrying a gun on that series would hardly seem to be his most remarkable achievement. Meanwhile, this convocation takes place when Not Sidney is eighteen, which would be seven years after he became the ward of Turner, roughly placing it sometime in the late 1990s. By this time, Cosby was a major African American cultural icon. In 1992, for example, he was a main speaker at the event in which the American Film Institute presented its Life Achievement Award to Sidney Poitier.
Cosby became an important film star in the 1970s, including co-starring with Poitier in three crime comedies that Poitier directed, comprising Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Let’s Do It Again (1975), and A Piece of the Action (1977). But Cosby became even more prominent as a television sitcom star with his groundbreaking performances as a teacher in The Bill Cosby Show (1969–1971) and (especially) as physician Cliff Huxtable in The Cosby Show (1984–1992), during much of its run it was the most popular television program in America. In the late 1990s, he was the star of still another sitcom and had become widely known for his support of education, buoyed by his own receipt of a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts in 1976. But Cosby was also famously visible as a spokesman in television commercials for a variety of products (most famously Jell-O Pudding Pops) in the 1980s. But he came under widespread criticism from African American activists and intellectuals when he delivered a speech at the 2004 NAACP Legal Defense Fund awards ceremony in which he was sharply critical of the African American community for bad parenting that had contributed to youthful criminal behavior such as stealing pound cakes.
This so-called “Pound Cake” speech, along with those Pudding Pops commercials, is prominently (if somewhat anachronistically) referenced in the almost surreal speech that Cosby delivers during that Morehouse convocation, excoriating his audience very much in the spirit of the Pound Cake speech, but with a heavy dose of clownish self-criticism added in as well:
You’re all pathetic. You’re pathetic until you’re not pathetic, until you do something strong and good and not until you do that. You think because you probably won’t be clad in an orange jumpsuit for stealing a piece of pound cake that I feel all warm and fuzzy about you. I sell Pudding Pops for the white man. I don’t know why I’m saying that, but I am. I make myself sick, but the white man is not to blame. He didn’t put the gun in the hands of the black kid down in juvenile hall. No, his missing father put it there. Pound cake. I’m on television. Black girls have babies by three or four fathers and why? Pudding Pops! (96–97)
Cosby then ends his speech with a self-serving pitch for his book Fatherhood (an actual book by Cosby published in 1986), announcing that he will be available to sign copies that will be on sale in the lobby after the convocation.
This satirical treatment of Cosby is very much in line with the other satire in I Am Not Sidney Poitier, much of which is aimed at the sacred cows of African American culture, a category that certainly includes such a things as the BET (Black Entertainment Television) cable network, which figures here as “N-E-T” (Negro Entertainment Television) and which Not Sidney purchases with his vast wealth, despite finding it irrelevant and uninteresting. Meanwhile, HBCUs come in for even more satiric treatment, as when Morehouse is lampooned as being anything but the “Harvard of the South” it likes to think of itself as being. For one thing, Not Sidney is able to buy admission to the university, even though he never graduated from high school. For another, much of his experience at the university involves his abusive hazing after pledging to Omega Psi Phi, a fraternity that enjoys an exalted stature in the African American community, despite a real-world legacy of serious injuries from hazing incidents. And, of course, much of Everett’s satire is aimed at show business figures such as Poitier and Cosby. Again, though, the Poitier and Cosby who figure in the novel are decidedly not identical to the “real” Cosby and Poitier, so that the real targets of the satire are not these real individuals but their status in the African American community, a status that ultimately reveals the paucity of role models offered to African American men by American culture.
The satire of Cosby, of course, takes on a new flavor when one considers the actor’s subsequent travails with criminal sexual abuse allegations (which were already in the air when I Am Not Sidney Poitier was being written but did not surface in full force until 2014). Still, as the treatment of Cosby shows, Everett’s critique of African American iconography is carried out in a very different spirit from the one that informs the Pound Cake speech. Everett’s satire is aimed mostly at the treatment of African American heroes and institutions so reverently that it obscures their reality. His critique is, accordingly, carried out with a light touch and with an irreverently humorous tone that eschews rancor or bitterness.
Not Percival Everett: “Real” People in I Am Not Sidney Poitier
I Am Not Sidney Poitier features a number of characters who bear the names of (and appear to be versions of) real-world individuals. In fact, various characters who bear the names of real-world personages not only play key roles in the plot but can also be taken as indicators of the sort of pastiche in which Everett is engaging in this novel. A note at the beginning of the novel declares that characters who share the names of real-world individuals do so purely by coincidence and are not to be taken as representations of those real-world individuals. Such disclaimers are common, generally for legal reasons. In this case, though, the disclaimer also serves a literary purpose as an announcement of the way language represents reality only in an indirect and mediated way in this novel. Thus, “Ted Turner” and “Jane Fonda” (and, certainly, “Percival Everett”) are not to be taken as literal representations of the famous real-world individuals who bear those names. In fact, even “Sidney Poitier” (who does not appear directly as a character but who is a constant presence) does not directly represent the fampus actor and director of that name but is instead a sort of marker of certain cultural phenomena. He is himself not Sidney Poitier in the way we remember him as a real person.
It is also important that Not Sidney does not consciously attempt to emulate Poitier. For example, he never seems aware when his experiences are retracing parts of the plots of various Poitier films, and he seems only vaguely familiar with those films, even though he is obviously very aware of Poitier himself. We never see Not Sidney actually watch a Poitier film until the final segment back in Los Angeles, when he tells us that, in his (or, actually, Poitier’s) room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he watched a movie called “For the Love of Ivy” (232). There is no indication that he had seen the film before, and he even slightly misquotes the title of the 1968 Poitier vehicle For Love of Ivy.Meanwhile, at one point earlier in the novel, Professor Everett asks Not Sidney if he has ever seen In the Heat of the Night, and Not Sidney answers that he has not. Everett urges him to watch the film because it is “a beautiful love story.” Then he gets Not Sidney to repeat the famous “call me Mr. Tibbs line” from that film, giving him an interesting bit of direction: “Say it as if a crab is biting your ass, as if someone is peeling an unpleasant and undesired memory from your core, as if you’re feeling a little bitchy, as if you might be gay but even you don’t know” (124).
This fictional Everett, of course, is decidedly not identical to the Percival Everett who wrote this novel. The introduction of this faux Everett, in fact, seriously complicates the rhetoric of the text, giving us a character who might as well have been named “Not Percival Everett.” Meanwhile, it would be perfectly appropriate to describe characters in I Am Not Sidney Poitier such as Poitier, Everett, Turner, Fonda, and Cosby as pastiches of their real-world counterparts. Rather than serving as direct representations of the people to whom their names refer, they merely draw (and comment) upon the styles and cultural significance of their originals. In short, the representational relationship between these characters and their originals is the same as that between the world of the novel and the real world, which is not directly mimetic, but dialogic.
The Everett character might be the most indicative here. Noting that fictional characters named “Percival Everett” also appear in other Everett novels (A History of the African American People and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell), Maus concludes that these figures serve as commentaries on representation in general, usefully evoking René Magritte’s famous 1929 painting The Treachery of Images, which reminds us that a picture of a pipe is not itself a pipe (122–23). We would argue, though, that what Everett is doing with the postmodern pastiches of real-world individuals in I Am Not Sidney Poitier is more radical than Magritte’s modernist observation. After all, Magritte’s non-pipe still represents a pipe, but Everett makes no attempt to pass off the fictional world of I Am Not Sidney Poitier as looking like the real world; instead, it has something of the essence of the real world and addresses many important issues in the real world but with very little concern for verisimilitude. This mode of representation is distinctively postmodern and is what Jameson, in his characterization of postmodernism, sometimes refers to as allegorical. However, for Jameson, referring to the high postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s, this indirect mode of representation is associated with the strong ideological alignment between postmodern culture and late capitalism, making culture a fully invested part of the commodity system that has no ability to render effective political critique of capitalism. I Am Not Sidney Poitier, we would argue, is postmodern in form but is able to overcome this political impotence through the sheer power of its engagement with the vexed issue of race in America.
Not Sidney’s Unstable Identity: “I AM NOT MYSELF TODAY”
From the moment he is named, Not Sidney’s identity is defined by a negation, and a complicated one at that. From the beginning, his name declares him to be unlike the dignified actor so many young African Americans had been told they were supposed to try to be like. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that not Sidney (for a reason he himself doesn’t understand) is particularly intrigued by one of Professor Everett’s absurd lectures on “a thing being self-identical” (106). Then, once he gets to Smuteye, Not Sidney seems to begin to destabilize, finding, for example, that the fit of some new shoes he has bought seems to be changing over time. At one key moment, he is asked his name by a waitress in a diner and responds that his name is “Sidney Poitier,” significantly dropping the “Not.” She thinks he’s kidding. “You name’s not Sidney Poitier, is it?” she reasonably inquires, which seems to trigger a sort of existential crisis: “What a question she had put to me without even knowing what she was doing, and so I answered truthfully the question she didn’t know she was asking. ‘It is’” (183).
Eventually, Not Sidney also finds that he seems to start looking older. At one point, he shaves in a truck stop restroom and finds himself disengaged from his own reflection in the mirror; it seems more Sidney Poitier’s face than his own: “The face was smooth, brown, older than I remembered, handsome. The face in the mirror smiled and I had to smile back” (191). Later, when he looks into the mirror in his car, he notes that “I looked so much older, felt so much older, stiff, and beleaguered. If I hadn’t known better I would have said I had a gray hair” (201). Soon afterward, Not Sidney experiences another shock when he is asked to try to identify the body of the man he had been accused of murdering, he finds that the murdered man looks exactly like him, a fact that is lost on the Smuteye cops, who apparently think that all black people look alike. Not Sidney himself, meanwhile, starts to wonder if the murdered man might in fact be him. The implications of this thought then lead him to a “logical” conclusion: “I thought that if that body in the chest was Not Sidney Poitier, then I was not Not Sidney Poitier and that by all I knew of logic and double negatives, I was therefore Sidney Poitier. I was Sidney Poitier” (212). By the time he accepts that award at the end of the novel, the narrator seems to have succumbed to this idea, though he is still not Sidney Poitier in any stable, straightforward way. As he looks out over the crowd, he suddenly realizes the words that should be carved onto his dead mother’s unmarked headstone—and, indeed, on his own: “I AM NOT MYSELF TODAY” (234).
The novel never explicitly tells us what is going on with Not Sidney’s shifting, fragmenting identity (or with that very bizarre dead double of him back in Smuteye). Demirtürk suggests that Not Sidney “is finally killed at the end, and becomes his double, Poitier, in order to receive an award in a ceremony” (87). In fact, Demirtürk believes that the dead body in Smuteye is, in fact, Not Sidney, though without providing any explanation for how the narration and the narrative continue on without him (102). However, read through Jameson’s discussion of fragmentation in postmodern texts—and in postmodern identities, then not Sidney’s fragile and fading identity is perfectly intelligible as an allegorical dramatization of the psychic fragmentation that Jameson identifies as a key element of the postmodern experience.
Jameson expresses this association most succinctly in “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in which he goes so far as to argue that the experience of the individual postmodern subject approaches that of the schizophrenic, who, as described by Lacan, is “condemned to live in a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future on the horizon” (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 137). In his later 1991 postmodernism book, Jameson expands on this idea, noting that he is not describing literal clinical schizophrenia but an “aesthetic model” (Postmodernism 26). In addition, he extends his discussion of this concept to a declaration that the old Marxist concept of “alienation” is a fundamentally modernist one and that “psychic fragmentation” better describes the more radical situation in which we find ourselves in the postmodern world (90).
This psychic fragmentation is reflected in both the characteristic formal fragmentation of postmodern texts and in the fragmentation of the identities of postmodern fictional characters. One thinks here of Tyrone Slothrop, the “protagonist” (if that word even applies) of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, who moves through the latter part of the novel slowly dissolving into the landscape, just “feeling natural,” and eventually disappearing altogether (626). Not Sidney, we would argue, experiences a very similar allegorical psychic fragmentation, eventually losing his own identity altogether, though in his case the dissolution of his identity is furthered by the failure of contemporary American media culture to produce viable subjective positions that can be occupied comfortably by a young African American like himself, even with his great wealth.
One might compare here “Ted Turner’s” function in the novel, which, as Dischinger notes, “defamiliarizes prevailing conceptions of the paternalistic white southerner” (432). Thus, his characterization also challenges key American cultural stereotypes. Because Turner is rich and white, however, he is able to occupy his eccentric position with more stability and ease than Not Sidney can occupy his position. We are assured, for example, that one of Turner’s key characteristics is that he is “comfortable in his skin,” which Not Sidney most decidedly is not (7). The special problems encountered by Not Sidney because of his race thus supplement and add nuance to Jameson’s theorization of psychic fragmentation by reminding us that different subjects might be fragmented in different ways and to different extents. Moreover, we find this reminder valuable enough that we prefer to retain the designations “postmodern work” and “postmodern subject” for this novel and its protagonist, even while remaining wary of the imposition of a broader nomenclature on a fictional African American subject and the text in which he appears.
In this sense, we concur with Madhu Dubey, who argued in 2003 that there was something distinctively different about “black literary postmodernism,” though choosing to maintain the “postmodern” designation, using a conception of postmodernism that was, in fact, heavily influenced by Jameson. Dubey does not mention Everett, and her book was perhaps a bit early to be fully able to appreciate his contribution. However, we do believe that her basic idea that black postmodernism has its own distinctive characteristics (but is still usefully described as “postmodern”) is sound and that Everett has now emerged as one of the most (if not the most) important practitioners of black postmodern fiction.
Conclusion
Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier borrows heavily from the films of Sidney Poitier in its construction, much along the lines of the technique of pastiche that Fredric Jameson has seen as a key characteristic of postmodern culture. In addition, the episodic nature of I Am Not Sidney Poitier is very much in line with the formal fragmentation discussed by Jameson as a key characteristic of postmodern texts, while Not Sidney’s dissolving identity can be related to the psychic fragmentation that Jameson has seen as a central element of life under late capitalism. However, Not Sidney’s fragile identity is also related to the inability of American culture to provide adequate role models for young black men, introducing an element of racial politics into the novel that takes it beyond the apolitical “high” postmodernism typically described by Jameson in relation to the culture of the 1970s and 1980s. The novel’s dialogue with the films of Poitier also addresses this issue, taking Everett’s use of pastiche beyond the “blank” parody associated by Jameson with postmodern pastiche.
Ultimately, then, I Am Not Sidney Poitier is less like the high postmodernism discussed by Jameson and more like the political form of postmodernism that he imagined might one day come along, moving beyond the postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s, driven by a project of cognitive mapping. Indeed, one could read Not Sidney’s various adventures precisely as attempts at cognitive mapping, as efforts to discover a comfortable subjective position that he can occupy in relation to the world in which he finds himself. That he ultimately fails to find such a position indicates both how difficult this task is in general and how especially difficult it is for a black man in America. At the same time, this failure also suggests that I Am Not Sidney Poitier has not fully achieved the political form of postmodernism envisioned by Jameson but instead should be regarded as a step in the direction of that political form, a step that is furthered by the perspective provided by the novel’s focus on race. Thus, while the novel might itself fail to provide effective alternative model identities for African Americans, its critique of the limited model identity projected by Poitier’s characters calls attention to the failure of American culture in general to provide such identities. In this sense, the title of I Am Not Sidney Poitier refers not just to the problematic subjective position of the novel’s protagonist, but also to that of African American men as a whole. At the same time, complicating the issue even more, I Am Not Sidney Poitier includes a clear suggestion that the whole idea of “African American” identity is problematic and that race cannot not be the sole factor in determining the identities of individuals.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press, 1981.
Baumbach, Nico, Damon R. Young, and Genevieve Yue. “Revisiting Postmodernism: An Interview with Fredric Jameson.” Social Text, Vol. 34, No. 2, June 2016, pp. 143–60.
Bentley, Nick, Nick Hubble, and Leigh Wilson. “Introduction: Fiction of the 2000s: Political Contexts, Seeing the Contemporary, and the End(s) of Postmodernism.” The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction. Edited by Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble, and Leigh Wilson, London: Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 1–26.
Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks. 4th ed. Continuum, 2001.
Booker, M. Keith. “Post-Black, Post-Huck, and Postmodern: The Dialogic Complexity of Percival Everett’s James (2024).” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, vol. 12, no.1, 2025, pp. 1-23.
Booker, M. Keith. “Strange Fruit: Menippean Laughter and the Gothic Return of the Past in Percival Everett’s The Trees.” American Gothic Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2025, pp. 46–62.
Demirtürk, E. Lâle. Contemporary African American Novel: Multiple Cities, Multiple Subjectivities, and Discursive Practices of Whiteness in Everyday Urban Encounters. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012.
Dentith, Simon. Parody. Routledge, 2000.
Dischinger, Matthew. “Percival Everett’s Speculative Realities.” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 68, nos. 3–4, 2015 Summer-Fall 2015, pp. 415–35.
Dubey, Madhu. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Everett, Percival. I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Graywolf Press, 2009.
Genette, Gerard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. 1982. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Green, Jeremy. Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium. Palgrave, 2005.
Hayman, Casey. “Hypervisible Man: Techno-Performativity and Televisual Blackness in Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier.” MELUS, vol. 39, no. 3, Fall 2014, pp. 135-154.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Post-modernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Methuen, 1985.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso, 2005.
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, New Press, 1983, pp. 111–125.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University
Press, 1991.
Maus, Derek C. Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire. University of South Carolina Press, 2019.
Mitchell, Keith B., and Robin G. Vander. “Changing the Frame, Framing the Change: The Art of Percival Everett.” Introduction to Perspectives on Percival Everett, edited by Mitchell and Vander, University Press of Mississippi, 2013, pp. ix–xvii.
Nealon, Jeffrey. Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism. Stanford University Press, 2012.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. Penguin, 2012.
Rose, Margaret. Parody/Metafiction: An Analysis of Parody as a Critical Mirror to the Writing and Reception of Fiction. Croom Helm, 1979.
Saldívar, Ramón. “Speculative Realism and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary American Fiction.” A Companion to American Literary Studies, edited by Caroline Levander and Robert S. Levine. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 517–531.
Schmidt, Christian. “Postblack Unnatural Narrative—Or, Is the Implied Author of Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier Black?” In Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States. Edited by James J. Donahue, Jennifer Ann Ho, and Shaun Morgan, Ohio State University Press, 2017, pp. 82–94.
Strachan, Ian Gregory. “A Blues for Tom: Sidney Poitier’s Filmic Sexual Identities.” In Poitier Revisited: Reconsidering a Black Icon in the Obama Age. Edited by Ian Gregory Strachan and Mia Mask, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, pp. 163–88.
Willis, Sharon. The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Notes
[1] On this aspect of James, see Booker (“Post-Black.”)
[2] In this sense, Margaret Rose’s notion of metafictional parody in postmodern texts provides valuable insights into I Am Not Sidney Poitier.
[3] As early as 2005, Jeremy Green argued that we had entered the era of a substantially different “late postmodernism.” In 2012, Jeffrey Nealon would adopt the term “post-postmodernism,” and, by 2015, Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble, and Leigh Wilson would note the increasing popularity of discussions of the “end of postmodernism” (15–16).
[4] See Maus for an extensive discussion of Everett’s fiction through So Much Blue (2017) within the context of Menippean satire. And see Booker (“Strange Fruit”) for a discussion of Everett’s The Trees in this context.
[5] Colvig was a prominent voice actor. He was, for example, the first actor to provide the voices of the characters Goofy and Pluto in Disney cartoons.
[6] The real Poitier received numerous awards, including becoming the first black actor to win a Best Actor Oscar for Lilies of the Field. The award that comes closest to the one at the end of this novel is probably his Honorary Academy Award in 2002, which was presented to him by Denzel Washington.
[7] On Poitier’s attempts to assert a more authentic sexual identity in his later films (opposed not just to the sanitized characters of his early films but also to the sometimes super-sexualized characters of films such as the Blaxploitation cycle), see Strachan.