DURING an early scene in acclaimed D new film American Fiction, the protagonist Monk - played by Jeffrey Wright wanders into a reading by fellow author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) of her new bestseller We's Lives in Da Ghetto. Monk, who has just left his own sparsely attended panel at the literary event, watches as a packed, mostly white audience sit enraptured by Sintara's words. "Yo Sharonda!," Sintara begins, switching abruptly into a comically "hood" drawl. "Girl, you be pregnant again?!" The camera slowly zooms onto Monk's face - his eyebrows crinkle, the sides of his mouth turn down. His disdain is silent, but evident.
The now Oscar-nominated film, former journalist Cord Jefferson's directorial debut and based on Percival Everett's 2001 novel Erasure, takes satirical aim at the publishing industry's obsession with reducing black writers to offensive clichés to pander to white audiences as one character bluntly summarises, "white publishers feeding black trauma porn".
It follows Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a jaded, middle-class black novelist who rails against the industry's elevation of books that peddle violence and present a monolithic view of blackness over what he sees as his own more rarefied literary pursuits.
This story is from the February 12, 2024 edition of Evening Standard.
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This story is from the February 12, 2024 edition of Evening Standard.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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