Metaparatextual Satire in Percival Everett's The Book of Training and Kent Monkman's Shame and Prejudice

Abstract

At first glance, Percival Everett’s The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson, Roanoke, VA 1843 and Kent Monkman’s multimedia project Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience may seem to have little in common beyond their somewhat unwieldy titles. Everett’s book initially appears to be a volume of poems by a Virginia slaveowner and annotated by (in)famous South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun, whereas the 2017 exhibition that Monkman curated is accompanied a purported memoir by Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a subversively satirical First Nations figure who also appears prominently in many of Monkman’s parodies of traditional Canadian painting. Each of them utilizes what transmedia scholar Matt Hills—building on the work of Gerard Genette and others—called “coordinating metaparatexts” in creating scathingly satirical commentaries on the manner in which dehumanizing racial and/or ethnic identities have been constructed and disseminated by the dominant (white) cultures of the United States and Canada. The understood omnipresence of both Everett and Monkman as these works’ ultimate creators creates the satirical paratextual layer that historiographically frames and alters the artificial paratextual relationship at their core.