Literacy and the Quest for Selfhood in Percival Everett’s James

Abstract

Percival Everett’s novel James won the National Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024. This masterful retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, narrated from the perspective of the enslaved Jim/James, offers a key point of engagement with the questions of who and what regulates access to the means of material and literary production—and who, consequently, is entitled to a voice in the American democratic machinery. In his reading of the novel, Professor Emeritus Robert Stepto explores the ways in which Black identity and literacy interact with, and speak back to, the “whiteness” of Huckleberry Finn’s own canonical status.