Colleagues may be interested in the passages on Huck Finn in Paul Beatty's Man Booker prize-winning novel The Sellout, a surrealistic comic tour de force somewhere between Ralph Ellison and Ishmael Reed.

In Chapter 7 one of the black characters says

One night, not long ago, I tried to read this book, Huckleberry Finn, to my grandchildren, but I couldn't get past page six because the book is fraught with the "n-word."...I took the liberty to rewrite Mark Twain's masterpiece. Where the repugnant 'n-word' occurs, I replaced it with 'warrior' and the word 'slave' with 'dark-skinned volunteer'

He also renames the book 'The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and his Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit'

There's more too...







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