Digging Up the Past, Complicating the Present, and Damaging the Future
Post-Postmodernism and the Postracial in Percival Everett’s The Trees
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20248505 |
|---|---|
| Authors | George Kowalik (0009-0004-0194-7834, King's College London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 86 |
| Publication date | 2023-08-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Humanities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787 |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/h12040086 |
| OpenAlex | W4385987301 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 10 |
Percival Everett has published almost thirty books of fiction in forty years, and The Trees is his 22nd novel. It revisits ideas from Everett’s earlier works while asking questions that, in some ways, tie his oeuvre together—these questions can be linked to temporality and history, problematic literary ideas such as post-postmodernism, and both racialised trauma and the flawed cultural concept of the postracial. In this article, I argue that The Trees specifically problematises claims of the postmodern end of history by suggesting that African American literary narrative can productively reckon with a history of mistreatment by literally digging up the past and actively (impossibly) changing it
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Digging · Epistemology · History of literature · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Postmodernism · Sociology · Temporality · Contemporary Cultural and Social Studies · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |