The politics of versional narration in contemporary African American fiction: Kiese Laymon’s Long Division and Percival Everett’s Telephone

Abstract

This article focuses on African American versional narratives, analysing the aesthetics and politics of versional narration in Kiese Laymon’s Long Division (2021) and Percival Everett’s Telephone (2020). Reading these recent novels within the context of African American metafictional and speculative literary traditions, it examines Laymon’s and Everett’s versional narratives to show how their experimenting with multiple versions can help reshape our ideas of social justice, solidarity, and resilience. After explaining some of the implications and potentials of theorizing versional narration, particularly in the context of African American writing traditions, the article provides interpretations of Laymon’s and Everett’s texts that demonstrate how Long Division uses versional narration to expose racialized vulnerabilities and the precarity of Black lives, while Telephone deploys versionality to articulate a more universal human ethics and philosophical critique.