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“The slack string is just a slack string”: Neoformalist Networks in The White Boy Shuffle

For all its wicked satire and kaleidoscopic cultural improvisation, Paul Beatty’s meditation on the political uses of cultural production in his debut novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996) doesn’t appear to go anywhere. This is because Beatty’s narrative ends precisely where it began: portraying the novel’s poète maudit Gunnar Kaufman as he reluctantly takes on the task of mobilizing the black community, encouraging them to embrace revolutionary suicide in lieu of continuing the losing battle against institutionalized racism in the United States at the close of the twentieth century. In depicting Gunnar’s success as a politician and poet as predicated on the imminent demise of both the public intellectual as well as his constituency, Beatty’s text does more than denounce the political uses of poiesis, or the aestheticization of politics. Significantly, it refuses to resolve these contradictions—to decide if cultural production proceeds from or precedes political action—focusing instead on forms of collective belonging that embrace such antitheses rather than foreclose them. The critical contribution of The White Boy Shuffle therefore lies not in revealing cultural production to be contingent upon political exigency, or the reverse, as much as it does in recognizing the value of contingency itself. What Beatty’s novel evinces, beginning as it does in media res and refusing conclusion, is not equivocation, but rather a meditation on being, quite literally, in the middle of things. In so doing, Shuffle highlights the similarity between the impasses afflicting both postmodern literary theory and contemporary literary criticism. Just as postmodern literary theorists seek to surpass Jameson’s observations on the growing isomorphism of cultural production and political economies of commodified exchange, so too do Americanist literary critics desire to move beyond cataloging the sins of a multiculturalism that finds political apotheosis in the mere recognition of cultural differences. If this