Towards the end of Paul Beatty’s Man–Booker prize-winning novel The Sellout, the narrator takes stock of contemporary Black art. The protagonist, known only by his last name, Me, is at a comedy club when a comedian abruptly stops his performance as a white couple start laughing hysterically at his jokes. The comedian yells: ‘“Do I look like I’m fucking joking with you? This shit ain’t for you. Understand? Now get the fuck out! This is our thing!’” (287). Me is both awed and confused by the performance:

Me picks up on the comedian’s phrase “our thing” to ask what qualifies as contemporary Black art and aesthetic expression. How can the comedian, Me wonders, draw a line between our thing and an idea of their thing? Extrapolating from Me, I finish Transscalar Critique by looking at how this is not just a question about comedy, but also a question of literary form. Through Me, Beatty’s novel joins a conversation encapsulated by Kenneth Warren in his controversial but essential What Was African American Literature? There, Warren claims that African American literature as an aesthetic category and enterprise existed only in relation to Jim Crow laws in the period following the failure of Reconstruction until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.