Contemporary Literature

Navigating Racialized Expectations

About halfway through Colson Whitehead’s 2009 novel Sag Harbor, his narrator, Benji, steals a six-pack of Coca-Cola from a friend’s house. During the summer of 1985, throughout which the novel is set, Coca-Cola introduced New Coke, containing a supposedly improved formula and taste. Dedicated Coke drinkers such as Benji were not pleased, and there was a substantial backlash, leading the company to reissue the previous formula under the instantaneously nostalgic name of “Coca-Cola Classic.” At this point in the novel, Benji, dedicated Coke drinker that he is, has been hoarding Old Coke. Finding several six-packs of Old Coke at the house of his friend Karen, Benji finds himself in a dilemma over whether to steal them or not. A few pages earlier, thinking about whether to shoplift from a convenience store, Benji imagines the “crisp, familiar, and so-dignified tone” of Sidney Poitier saying, “They think we steal, and because they think we steal, we must not steal” (101), leading him to pay for his Fruit [End Page 421] Roll-Up. In this case, however, he does decide to steal the Cokes, comically spilling them across the floor as he attempts to make a stealthy exit. Benji’s narration reflects on the unique paralysis of his position: “Move. Don’t move. Act. Don’t act. The results were the same. This was my labyrinth” (106). Benji’s dilemma, framed as it is by Poitier’s assertion of racial stereotypes, typifies the discursive tension over the definition of African American art in the twenty-first century. Much like Benji, black artists stand at the nexus of diverse racialized expectations about the relationship between their racial identity and the form and content of their artistic expression. Returning to the image of Benji, his crime exposed, I suggest that we can interrogate his dilemma more broadly: How does one navigate this labyrinth of expectations? Is there agency only in the process of negotiating expectations, or is there the possibility of a more totalizing liberation?

The early twenty-first century has seen a variety of attempts to answer such questions. In particular, these potential answers have been framed as the transition from previous eras, during which African American identity was represented as more clearly defined, into an increasingly diverse and messy present. Emphasizing this sense of transitional change, such concepts have been consistently labeled as “post” or “new” (for example postrace, post–civil rights, post-soul, post-black, the New Black Aesthetic, NewBlack).¹ Despite the diversity of such terms, “[t]here is considerable overlap between them,” as Paul C. Taylor points out, and they should be understood “as different names for the same complex reality” (625). In this essay, I analyze Colson Whitehead’s novel Sag Harbor in relation to the increasingly prominent concept of postblackness to illustrate the trend in post–civil rights African American literature toward conceiving of racial identity in individualistic terms.

As the scene in which Benji steals the Cokes illustrates, Whitehead is particularly attentive to the contradictory burdens felt by artists of color in the early twenty-first century. In a 1999 interview, he explicitly connected the post–civil rights era and the agency of the [End Page 422] black artist. In response to a question about whether African American writers in the present “have more freedom than previous generations,” he stated: “Now I think there are a lot more of us writing and a lot more different areas we’re exploring. It’s not as polemicized. I’m dealing with serious race issues, but I’m not handling them in a way that people expect” (“Going Up”). Pejoratively describing the work of previous generations of African Americans as polemical, Whitehead makes it clear that while he is interested in dealing “with serious race issues,” he does so absent the political prescriptions that marked past eras. Instead of feeling obligated to address the importance of...