Dickens Lost: A Study on the Spatial Practice in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout

Abstract

Paul Beatty, as a representative writer of contemporary African American literature, pays close attention to the living space of African Americans, and their inheritance of their own history and culture in his Booker-Prize-winning novel The Sellout. Based on Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad, this article analyzes how characters draw inspiration from their historical and cultural legacy, compete for their living space, remedy spatial injustice, and obtain their right of habitation in an erased black ghetto of Los Angeles, i.e., Dickens, with an attempt to elucidate the essence of their spatial practices of reinstituting slavery and segregation. It argues that beneath the surface of spatial change lies the pain caused by colonialism, the constraints of existing policies and the struggle of African Americans. Dickens, a seemingly marginal space, is, in effect, a representation of the negligible existence of Black people in America as well as a basis of their identity. By delving deep into the characters’ peculiar spatial practices that deconstruct state-level structural racism, this article demonstrates that Beatty criticizes the history of racial discrimination against Black people, expresses his concerns on the possible vulnerability of contemporary African Americans, and provides a new insight into their survival strategy in the so-called post-racial era.

1. Introduction

Paul Beatty (1962–) is an African American author and an associate professor of writing at Columbia University. He was honored with the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Man Booker Prize for his work of fiction The Sellout (Beatty 2015). The judges praised this novel as it “challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—black Chinese restaurant” (Booker Prize Foundation 2016). As a representative writer of contemporary African American literature, Beatty’s works show his deep concern for racial realities in America. He was born and raised in Los Angeles. Tormented by racial tensions, this metropolis acts as the source of his literary creation. The Sellout is infused with humorous satire and profound social themes by telling a story of the protagonist Bonbon’s isolated upbringing in Dickens, a black ghetto of South Los Angeles, and the racial trial at the Supreme Court for trying to reinstate slavery and segregation in the post-racial era.

Currently, many scholars have interpreted the novel from diverse perspectives: style and rhetoric, place and space, and other socio-cultural criticism. For instance, Maria Canelo examined “how the literary devices of parody and allegory assist in the creation of a satire, particularly of the U.S. carceral system” (Canelo 2022, p. 187). Scott Astrada explored “how the protagonist of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout dwell within his home provides much insight into how race, identity, and history impact dwelling in a global age” based on Martin Heidegger’s essay on dwelling and Michel Foucault’s understanding of history as power (Astrada 2017, p. 104). Debajyoti Biswas and Arun Sarkar demonstrated that “the so-called legal social agencies which promise to ensure justice to one and all are in fact hegemonic entities controlled by white-supremacist capitalist forces” after analyzing this novel within the theoretical framework of critical race theory (Biswas and Sarkar 2021, p. 467). It is no doubt that numerous studies have delved into various aspects related to The Sellout, including the spatial dimension. However, these studies are confined to the interpretation of Dickens in Los Angeles as a space that controls or puts limits on Black people’s behavior, and they fail to elucidate the essence of Bonbon and his friends’ strange practices in this space, which is also a distinctive narrative feature of the novel.

In fact, the “spatial practice” is a critical concept in French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad. The core viewpoint of Lefebvre’s theory is that the production of space can be divided into “three dialectically interconnected dimensions or processes” (Schmid 2008, p. 29). This kind of triple dialectical relationship is doubly determined and, correspondingly, doubly designated. On the one hand, it refers to the triad of “spatial practice,” “representations of space,” and “representational spaces.” On the other hand, it refers to “perceived,” “conceived,” and “lived” space (Lefebvre 1991, p. 38). This parallel series points to a twofold approach to space: one phenomenological and the other linguistic or semiotic. All three concepts denote, at once, the individual and social processes that are not only conducive to the self-production of man but to the self-production of society. At the award ceremony in London, Beatty admitted the close connection between the novel and the space: “It was a hard book for me to write; I know it’s hard to read. I’m just trying to create space for myself. And hopefully that can create space for others” (Meier 2016). Apparently, for Beatty, the novel conveys this creative idea, and it succeeds in reflecting the contemporary racial politics of the United States through the perspective of spatial politics.

As a ghetto, Dickens has always been a marginal area to residents of the city. It can be regarded as a conceived space that was constructed by the dominant White people, and a lived space inhabited by the Black community. Most importantly, it is a perceived space that delivers hidden messages of exclusion and expulsion, but also one that is revealed only through Bonbon’s “deciphering” of it (Lefebvre 1991, p. 38). It is not until Bonbon puts his plan of spatial competition into practice that the blurred racial boundaries between Black people and White people become increasingly visible. Therefore, this article sets out to analyze the protagonist and other characters’ peculiar spatial practices that deconstructs state-level structural racism based on Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad from three levels, which are the oppressive nature of the marginal space, desperate struggles for the living space, and interracial intimacy in the urban space, to reveal how Beatty manages to highlight the persistent tension and conflict between two races, as well as explore possibilities of social reform and racial equality.

2. Oppressive Nature of the Marginal Space

The Black narrator-protagonist Bonbon of The Sellout grows up in Dickens, a ghetto community on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles. According to Lefebvre’s spatial triad, “every social space is the outcome of a process with many aspects and many contributing currents” (Lefebvre 1991, p. 110). In short, every social space has a unique history that can provide insights into its past owners, construction, and usage. Los Angeles is “a city of contradictions, and race and other forms of identity are themselves self-contradictory modes of categorization” (Franco 2019, p. 6). Throughout the twentieth century, L.A.’s famously expansive area facilitated the development of several new white enclaves on the city’s west and north sides, while redlining real estate practices and subsequent infrastructure construction, effectively sequestering the minority-dominant populations in the industrial east and south sections of the city. The establishment of Dickens offers a perfect example. It was originally built as an agrarian community, where “the city sidewalks, along with your rims, car stereo, nerve, and progressive voting record, will have vanished into air thick with the smell of cow manure and, if the wind is blowing the right direction—good weed” (Beatty 2015, p. 28). It is evident that White patriarchs govern this marginal space because they are capable of channeling city resources to select neighborhoods and shunting resources away from others. Under these circumstances, different living spaces are endowed with distinct characteristics that clarify the racial differences and social orientations of their inhabitants. This is a process often termed as “Othering” through which identities of blacks and whites are set up in an unequal relationship (Crang 1998, p. 59). Having lived in Dickens for a long time, Bonbon is aware of his inferior status in American society. “Like the entire town of Dickens, I was my father’s child, a product of my environment, and nothing more” (Beatty 2015, p. 40). This understanding suggests that he has developed a negative tendency toward self-deprecation as he perceives Dickens as an insignificant place in accordance with the preexisting institutional orders of white supremacy. The tendency here designates a practice, a spatial practice, mobilized by the (equally spatial) representations constructed by White people. Consequently, the production of such spaces as Dickens functions as “a tool of thought and of action,” “a means of control, and hence of domination, of power” (Lefebvre 1991, p. 26). The influence of this strategy is far-reaching because a sense of alienation has become deeply rooted in Black citizens’ hearts. They have no choice but to live passively in representational spaces characterized by marginalization and social exclusion.

Spatial differentiation can exert oppressive and exploitative effects, especially when maintained over long time periods and grounded in persistent divisions in society like those based on race. After finishing high school, Bonbon left home to go to college. In a winter vacation at his junior year, he returned only to find that his father had been shot dead by the police only because “he charged them” (Beatty 2015, p. 43). This tragic event directly alludes to the fact that there have been some notable incidents of police killings of Black Americans since 2014. Law’s granting the right to use force by police allows them to resort to lethal violence with considerable leeway. However, “Nationally, Black people are eight times more likely to be killed by a firearm than White people” (Mesic 2016, p. 1). This black-white disparity in firearm homicide in the U.S. has been widely recognized, which explains why Bonbon did not cry when he saw his father lying at an intersection of Dickens in a pool of blood. Instead, he chose to “curse the system because your father has died at the hands of the police” (Beatty 2015, p. 43). As the face of the criminal justice system, the police are the visible incarnation of state authority and crime control. One reason for the staggering racial disparity in the fatal shootings of unarmed victims by police is that Black people have often been stereotyped as criminals in American society. The unfortunate death of Bonbon’s father proves that the reputation of Black citizens has been “besieged” by beliefs about predispositions toward criminality. When he was talking to the police, Bonbon “could almost see his brain cross-referencing my scars, height, and build with some database of wanted felons filed inside his head” (Beatty 2015, p. 43). He was very conscious of the policeman’s misperception of him as suspect, deceptive, noncompliant or even aggressive. It indicates that not only does the derogatory black criminal stereotype render Black people vulnerable to excessive policing and criminal legal intervention, but it also makes them constantly worry about whether police officers will judge and treat them unfairly. Bonbon’s spatial practice of perpetuating ideas linking race with criminality embodies “a close association, within perceived space, between daily reality and urban reality” (Lefebvre 1991, p. 38). Ever since Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, many have posited that America is no longer preoccupied with the notion of race, thus entering into “a post-racial age in politics” (Tesler 2016, p. 4). Regrettably, this assertion is in marked contrast to the continued racial inequality in the criminal justice system.

Owing to its exclusivity, individuality, and boundaries, spatial separation turns out to be a tactic of class division that decides the social order and interpersonal relationships. As a representational space, the Dickens of Los Angeles reflects the vertical relationships in American society that are formed in the mechanism of the uneven geographical distribution of resources. “No other city in the United States has such a quicksilver character, seems so ahistorical, and is yet so segregated” (Franco 2019, p. 11). Dickens is mainly inhabited by middle- and low-income groups like Black people, Mexican people, and East-Asian refugees. Outside this place, White people in Los Angeles reap profits from the increasing social and cartographical immobility of people of color. The confrontation between poor and affluent neighborhoods underlies the class and residential differentiation in American cities, thereby outlining the social order of Los Angeles. The residents of Dickens are both strangers and marginal people in the city who mostly work as farmers, miners, and bus drivers for subsistence wages. Unimportant as they are, they comprise the major workforce population that promotes urban economic development. Although everyone remains right where they have always been, Dickens disappears almost overnight. The erasure of this place is caused by the steady expansion of the real estate sector outward into the suburbs. Bonbon recollects that “It was part of a blatant conspiracy by the surrounding, increasingly affluent, two-car-garage communities to keep their property values up and blood pressures down” (Beatty 2015, p. 57). It can be seen from this that segregation and racism remain secondary to the demands and flows of capital, even if they are important factors in the city’s construction. Lefebvre proposes that “Capitalism and neocapitalism have produced abstract space, which includes the ‘world of commodities’, its ‘logic’ and its worldwide strategies, as well as the power of money and that of the political state” (Lefebvre 1991, p. 53). He believes that, through their manipulation of abstract space, the bourgeois capitalist system has successfully exerted partial control over the commodity market. Since the twenty-first century, Los Angeles has experienced a real estate boom, where the real estate industry, rather than heavy manufacturing, has become key to the urban economy. It means that Dickens is subject to capital control and monopoly, further isolating its residents from the income growth that characterizes the city: “No one cared” (Beatty 2015, p. 58). Within the spatial practice of American society, Bonbon acquired a representation of this space, which is that white hegemony remains as entrenched in the economics of real estate as the materiality of the segregated and unequal spaces it produces.

3. Desperate Struggles for the Living Space

Space is the most basic resource of human survival and development. It is both a battlefield for power struggle and a platform that carries individual life experience. Dani Cavallaro claims that space is “the embodiment of cultural, political and psychological phenomena” (Cavallaro 2001, p. 170). Its organization and the ways in which it is experienced and conceptualized help to bring about the mapping of individual lives and social relations. Dickens is the representational or lived space of Black people, behind which is the operating mechanism of power and a survival instinct of human beings. Its evanesce has delivered a heavy blow to the old man Hominy Jenkins, who makes a living by acting, as Bonbon narrates, “I can’t count how many times I had to wrap a blanket around him because he was trying to commit suicide-by-gangbanger by wearing red in the blue neighborhoods, blue in the red” (Beatty 2015, p. 66). To Hominy, Dickens is the only living space that allows him to settle down and get on with his pursuit, and yet it is drastically squeezed by capital flows and deindustrialization. The stark realities of life push him into an abyss of poverty and hopelessness, which reduce him to wandering around the city and attempting to end his life. Evidently, Hominy has formed what Yi-Fu Tuan calls “Topophilia”, that is, “human being’s affective ties with the material environment” (Tuan 1990, p. 93). He loves Dickens so deeply that even blood can be shed in his defense. This place is his home, the locus of his memories, and the means of gaining a livelihood. Generally speaking, White people conceive Dickens as a space that does not matter to them, but Black people such as Hominy show a strong dependence upon it: “Because when Dickens disappeared, I disappeared. I don’t get fan mail anymore. I haven’t had a visitor in ten years, cause don’t nobody know where to find me. I just want to feel relevant” (Beatty 2015, p. 77). Clearly, Hominy defines his identity by his place in the land, by his home, as he is obviously unable to obtain approval from others. As far as he is concerned, the loss of Dickens is the loss of his identity. In other words, the seemingly marginal space like Dickens is a representation of the negligible existence of Black people in America, and it is a basis of their identity. Whether it is the commercialization of housing in the conceived space, or the identity construction in the perceived space, Black citizens cannot escape the fate of being discriminated against and ostracized.

The spatial narrative of The Sellout reveals the land-use change in Los Angeles. Spaces do have historic and cultural significance as they function to maintain memories and encourage practices that reinforce community knowledge and cohesiveness. It points to one of the fundamental facts about satiric novels, which is that “the sardonic vision is the seamy side of the tragic vision” (Frye 1944, p. 85). Beneath the surface of spatial change lies the pain caused by colonialism, the constraints of existing policies, and the struggle of Black people. Throughout African American history, Black people have never stopped in their pursuit of living space. Lefebvre holds that representational spaces are manifested as “complex symbolisms” (Lefebvre 1991, p. 33). For Bonbon and Hominy, Dickens is a roof over their heads that provides them with a sense of belonging, and in turn serves as a symbol of hope, unity, and prosperity. The rebuilding of this space is the only way through which to prove their identity to the outside world, thus enabling them to survive and thrive in America. Spatial practice has different forms of expression, including concrete actions. Hominy’s practice is being publicly whipped as a slave by his savior, Bonbon. The invented tradition of slavery is satirically maintained by Black men. “The whistle of that brown-and-black reversible whip cutting through the air and raining down hard in loud skin-popping thunderclaps on Hominy’s back” (Beatty 2015, p. 79). The physical pain brought by whipping may best be interpreted as the history that hurts—the still-unfolding narrative of rejection, dispossession, and domination that endangers Black citizens. Lefebvre points out that “rites and ritualisation intervene in everyday time, punctuating it” (Lefebvre 2004, p. 94). Performances of rituals regulate or even create economic, political, and religious relations among people who are ambivalent about each other. Additionally, rituals around the world abound with cutting, scarring, and other painful markings. Therefore, Hominy’s violent spatial practice can be regarded as a sacrificial ritual that produces structures and hierarchies. His object is to accentuate the presence of the black body in the conceived space, thereby rebuilding a typical representational space for African Americans. Bonbon clearly remembers the scene of “Hominy bleeding in the street and, like every slave throughout history, refusing to press charges” (Beatty 2015, p. 79). This ritual is conducive for creating cultural cohesion by means of presenting a form through which its ethical and aesthetic content offers a sense of security in times where the presence of the bigger society is easily lost sight of. It holds out the promise of compensating for Black people’s experience of a loss of identity and authenticity.

Despite forces pushing for the preservation of white privilege through the conceptualization and occupation of space, there occurs resistance from new generations against the formal and informal mechanisms that constrain and depress the value of the lives of black, brown, and poor. Hominy’s ritual creates an overwhelming synesthetic environment, making Bonbon commune with the miserable life of Black people in the past. He realizes his responsibility and identity as an African American, which prompts him to fight for Black people’s rights to remain in their homes and on their streets. Victor Turner reckons that this kind of communitas is “a transformative experience that goes to the root of each person’s being and finds in that root something profoundly communal and shared” (Turner 2011, p. 138). The spatial practice of Bonbon is similar to that of Hominy because he also draws inspiration from African American history and culture, as well as an intention to emphasize the difference between the victim and the rest of society. The initial step is to “circumnavigate the twelve miles of border with a three-inch strip of white paint” (Beatty 2015, p. 99). The jagged line surrounding the remnants of Dickens is not only the disappeared borderline of the neighborhood itself, but also the dividing line between white and black neighborhoods. It represents the spatial demarcation of white and black territory in Los Angeles, implying that the city has already split apart due to invisible but fiercely held boundaries of race and class. In structured societies, it is the marginal or inferior person or the outsider who often comes to symbolize what David Hume has called “the sentiment for humanity” (Turner 2011, p. 111). Segregated spaces in the city remain unconsciously normalized for many Black residents, forming a “buffer” between them and the reality of poverty and inequality in a resource-deprived ghetto. Bonbon’s spatial practice foregrounds the typical representations of Dickens, considering that a man’s personal experience on entering the space is the prerequisite of his awareness of his identity in that space. The redrawing of Dickens’ borderline resonates with the local people who suffer from spatial injustice as some elderly residents intuitively understand the purpose of the line, wondering “why they felt so strongly about the Dickens side of the line as opposed to the other side” (Beatty 2015, p. 109). Here, a group identity as African Americans is created through a non-verbal form of interaction and communication. It is precisely this communitas that determines the identity of the black community and the way through which they bond together and become a cohesive, intimate, and integrated whole.

4. Interracial Intimacy in the Urban Space

Beatty vividly describes that, as the suburban housing development plan enacts devastating losses of residential and social spaces, people from aggrieved communities voluntarily express their claims to living space in the ways that are accessible to them. The next spatial practice of Bonbon is performing a drama about racial segregation on buses based on the history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It is universally known that this significant event “carried forward and consummated the communitarian lifeblood of the African American freedom struggle” (Burns 1997, p. 4). Bonbon shows his yearning for an unparalleled unity across race and class lines exemplified by this movement through his careful guidance for the drama. He asks Hominy to play the role of the Black passenger, and employs Laura Jane, a White actress, to play the role of the White passenger. Moreover, he holds the bus as the stage, and he convinces his girlfriend, Marpessa, who is the bus driver, to put up the sign of “PRIORITY SEATING FOR SENIORS, DISABLED, AND WHITES” on the bus (Beatty 2015, p. 128). Bonbon evidently mobilizes all the available resources as tools for enhancing the realistic effect of the play with the aim of delineating Black people as outside of the white definition of citizenship. Within such a confined space as a bus, the physical dimensions of white space and black space are jointly constituted. Hominy’s behavior of offering his seat to Laura inevitably indicates the fact that an expansion of white space comes at the expense of a contraction of black space. By extension, the inconvenience and relative discomfort of Black people make the convenience and comfort of White people possible. Watching a Black man obsequiously giving up his seat to a White woman, the audience or other passengers spontaneously feel that “they, too, had a white person next to them baring their forearms and wanting to compare tans after they’ve returned from a Caribbean vacation” (Beatty 2015, p. 133). It must be admitted that Bonbon’s drama profoundly reveals a real world where Black people are always expected to be watching and ready to move and to relinquish their rights for White people. While “injecting a desperately needed sense of perspective into a field filled with diatribes and vitriol” (Snyder 2018, p. 5), this practice provides the Dickens residents with a foundation of historical facts that is solid enough to inform the most urgent problem of the present. And that problem is the alleged advent of a post-racial and color-blind society. Thus, the segregated space of the bus calls on Black citizens for a continual racial performance.

Race remains as essential to the urban space and dominant ideologies in American society as it always has been. Apart from the bus, another typical space where racial segregation took place is the school. Although the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Patterson 2001) decision has resulted in “dismantling the dual system of segregated schooling through the use of desegregation plans” (McPherson 2011, p. 466), the novel reflects the fact that American schools are still separate and unequal, albeit in different and subtle ways. Bonbon’s last spatial practice is just carried out in schools. He deliberately sets up the Wheaton Academy, i.e., a school that only recruits White children. In sharp contrast to this school, the Chaff Middle School of Dickens mainly recruits Black and Mexican children. By doing so, Black and White students are unable to fully desegregate the American schools so long as schools like the Wheaton Academy deny enrollment to Black students. These two completely different schools, coexisting within the same social space, are strongly reminiscent of the separate schools attended by White people and African Americans before the twentieth-first century. “Segregation in the school system has been mentioned repeatedly in the literature as a disadvantage of the spatial concentration of population groups” (Bolt 1998, p. 86). It suggests that children of ethnic minorities are usually less likely to receive a good education if they attend “black schools” than when they go to “white schools.” The Chaff Middle School is concerned about the drop-out problem of students, shortage of teachers, and the backwardness of teaching facilities, while the Wheaton Academy is equipped with “pristine facilities, effective teachers, sprawling green campus” (Beatty 2015, p. 255). In this case, attending separate schools means attending unequally resourced schools, which is beneficial for the future development of White students but harmful to that of Black students. The huge gap in educational resources naturally propels many parents to “join the ranks of the giant Anglo kids” (Beatty 2015, p. 193). It directly indicates that school segregation is interconnected with socioeconomic disparities. Apparently, even if the link between race and class has been weakened by the court-ordered desegregation, progress toward racial integration has been undermined by “white flight to majority-white school districts and to private schools” (Mijs 2021, p. 8). The focus of Bonbon’s practice on school segregation demonstrates that the lack of interaction among different races not only hampers the harmonious contact among people, but also limits the fusion of different cultures and traditions. This will lead to inter-ethnic retreat and reduce chances of integration, implicating further racial conflict in American society.

Struggling with the spatially experienced fact of a continuing deep segregation is not an easy task. Lefebvre views an active human body as “a machine calling for massive energy supplies, and an information-based machine with low energy requirements” (Lefebvre 1991, p. 93). Bonbon’s spatial practices that reanimate Dickens are carried out on the premise of human energies being consumed on a massive scale. The excessive consumption of his energies makes him feel exhausted, which results in a serious consequence for him. In other words, he is formally charged with “crimes against humanity” by the California attorney general (Beatty 2015, p. 265). This prosecution implies the outcome of a violation of the hidden rules set by White people in their conceived space. There is no specific character in the novel that represents the White authority, but the advantageous social position of White Americans can be discerned from the operation of the Supreme Court. Within the American legal system, “the voice of the United States Supreme Court speaks with particular prominence on a wide range of matters, arguably including matters of race” (Smith 2002, p. 714). Decisions of the Supreme Court around racial issues play an important role in shaping the popular thinking and public policies of America. It must be admitted that a lawsuit against Bonbon’s spatial practices at the Supreme Court provides a means through which to discuss how to achieve genuine racial equality in contemporary America. One of the Supreme Court Justices takes this trial as “the legal quandary”, which is that “whether a violation of civil rights law that results in the very same achievement these heretofore mentioned statutes were meant to promote, yet have failed to achieve, is in fact a breach of said civil rights” (Beatty 2015, p. 274). It is true because white hegemony, open violence, and institutional discrimination are recast and recoded into capital restructuring, practices of rights, and individual freedom. Bonbon just creates hypothetical situations that contain elements found in the pre-civil rights period. In these situations, Black people and White people enter a space expected to perform a particular role and to adhere to a particular racial routine. Through Bonbon’s spatial practices, Beatty expresses his concerns on the possible vulnerability of contemporary Black people. The keynote in these hypotheses is not what may happen to African Americans but what will happen to all American people. In essence, America is a world where different races live within the same space as members of a larger family. Altering the boundaries and meanings of the urban space, Bonbon’s practices revolve around interracial intimacy. That is why “Dickens is back on the map” in the end (Beatty 2015, p. 284).

5. Conclusions

In general, The Sellout presents a spatial panorama of African Americans’ survival and resistance in a metropolis by describing the spatial practices of Bonbon and his friends. Whether it is the loss of the living space, or the competition for the living space, the only constant in the spatial change is Black people’s desire and hope for racial equality. Although the past traumatic experience has left them physically and emotionally scarred, they still have the courage and confidence to overcome racial barriers and embark on a whole new life. The novel reflects Beatty’s ruthless critical spirit against racial hypocrisy and his profound inquiry into the urban construction, capitalist development, and white supremacism in American society. Through characters’ spatial practices of reinstituting slavery and racial segregation, he criticizes the history of racial discrimination against Black people, and provides a new insight into the survival strategy of contemporary African Americans at the same time. Based on this aspect, the spatial narrative of the novel possesses momentous current significance and far-reaching historical significance.