African American Review

Abstract:

Percival Everett's Glyph (1999) is a bitingly comical and theoretically challenging satire narrated by Ralph, a black baby genius, who writes fiction and his own theory thereof. The novel, this article argues, can be read as a satiric commentary on the establishment of African American literature as an object and discipline of literary inquiry. With a rich institutional subtext, the text's playfully emancipatory agenda centers on the expressive principle on which this literary institutionalization was based: the black vernacular. Ralph's lack thereof defines Glyph's programmatic ambivalence as a "black" text that categorically questions the ways we read (for) race.