The Sellout Study Guide

Paul Beatty was born in Los Angeles and moved to the East Coast for higher education, graduating with an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College and an MA in Psychology from Boston University. In 1990 he was named Grand Poetry Slam Champion at the Nuyorican Poets Café, which helped him to secure his first book deal. In addition to The Sellout, he is the author of Tuff, Slumberland, and The White Boy Shuffle, along with two collections of poetry. The Sellout was the first book by a non-Commonwealth author to win the Man Booker Prize after the rules for eligibility were amended; it also received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Beatty lives in New York City with his wife, Althea Amrik Wasow, to whom The Sellout is dedicated.

The main event to which The Sellout is responding is the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Published at the end of Obama’s two-term presidency, the novel critiques the idea that the election of a black president signals the end of racism and a triumph of racial progress. Other significant historical events include certain Supreme Court rulings such as Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which ruled that the descendants of slaves did not count as US citizens, and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld the constitutional acceptability of segregation. The Civil Rights Movement is also of major importance in the novel, particularly events such as Rosa Parks’ protest and the ensuing bus boycott, along with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling (1954) that declared segregation unconstitutional, and the famous integration crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, that followed. The “Little Rock Nine” were the first nine black students to enroll in a previously all-white high school, and they were initially blocked from entering by the governor of Arkansas himself.

The Sellout is part of a long and illustrious tradition of African-American satire. This includes such works as The Blacker the Berry (1929) by Wallace Thurman, which was a Harlem Renaissance novel critiquing racial politics within the black community through dark humor. Like The Sellout, Claude McKay’s controversial Home to Harlem (1928) depicts working-class black people and experiments with the representation of racial stereotypes. Perhaps the most important figure in the African-American satirical tradition is Ishmael Reed, whose most famous novel, Mumbo Jumbo (1972), lampoons religion, various black leaders, class tensions, and respectability politics. Reed’s campus novel Japanese By Spring (1993) takes aim at academics in a manner reminiscent of The Sellout’s presentation of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals. Fran Ross’ Oreo (1974) is another satirical novel that, like The Sellout, revolves around its central character’s search for her own origins and identity.