This talk explores the feeling of nausea as it arises in Percival Everett’s 1999 novel Erasure. I read Monk’s nausea as the affective expression of the aesthetic problem of a definitionally African American or black American literature. Situating this novel within ongoing contemporary debates on the contours (and existence) of post-soul black culture, I am suggesting that the terms of inclusion may prove less interesting than the frustrations they produce, registered in this case at the levels of novel structure and intimate, bodily queasiness. This is part of an ongoing interest in dizzying states and (hopefully!) the beginning of a contained project on negative affects in contemporary race fiction.

Lauren Michele Jackson is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of the essay collection White Negroes and is currently working on a second book with Amistad Press with assistance as a 2022 National Fellow at the New America Foundation.