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Paul Beatty's The Sellout (2015) is an uncomfortable read on several levels. There are no comfortable positions to take in Beatty's novel concerning race in America; there is no comfortable generic categorization for the novel; and the question what it means for the British Booker Prize to be awarded to a novel from the USA is one with no easy answer. In an attempt to find some answers, I will refocus these problems by shifting the frame and moving theme, novel, and context out of their respective comfort zones.
The Booker Prize, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2018, may need little introduction; through its high-profile media coverage it has become widely known all over the world as a British literary prize for fiction. Since 2014, when it first invited US nominations, the prize has been awarded to two American novels: Paul Beatty's The Sellout in 2016 and George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo in 2017. Whereas the decision to include US nominations remains controversial, it may be promising for a literary analysis to identify features of the winning American novels that fit the paradigm established by the earlier novels honored. Although primarily concerned with The Sellout., possible reasons for the selection of both American winners of the prize will be suggested: the semi-postcolonial profile established in the 1980s and 1990s for the prize; the judges' attempt to focus on fiction with high literary ambitions and popular interest; and the English tradition of taking comic fiction seriously.
The colonial origins of the Booker Prize and the connection between the prize and Ian Fleming's James Bond books are perhaps less often discussed. Fleming mentioned a problem- that his James Bond books were not selling well-to his neighbor in Oxfordshire. The neighbor, a certain Jock Campbell, was at the time "the head of the Booker Company which owned most of the sugar plantations in colonial Guyana, when Guyana was invariably referred to as 'Booker Guiana.'" The short version of the story can be found online in the Guyana Chronicle, the long version in Clem Seecharan's Sweetening Bitter Sugar. Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer in British Guiana, 1934 - 1966 (2005). Campbell suggested that the Booker Company buy the rights to Fleming's books (but not the films), be...