Abstract
The paper deals with the topic of panoptical anxiety as thematically rendered by Paul Beatty in The Sellout. This critically acclaimed novel ironically and ostentatiously feeds off the self-vigilant communal reflex that has been a steady presence in African American literature, given that black writers from the late 18th through the mid-20th century communicated primarily to a presumed white readership.
The ubiquitous panopticism thematized by Beatty's novel is used to fuel a fragmentary polemic with Kenneth E. Warren's contention that African American literature arose in response to specific historical circumstances and, with these historical realities no longer present, it has lost its fundamental raison d'etre as a distinctly demarcated phenomenon.