“Why are these books here?” asks Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, the writer protagonist of the film American Fiction, as he points to four novels stacked neatly on the shelf of a chain bookstore. The name Ellison sticks out from their spines.
Monk wants to know why his Greek-tragedy-inspired novels are housed not in “Mythology” but in the “African American Studies” section. A bookstore employee offers the obvious explanation: “I would imagine that this author, Ellison, is … Black.” He has the decency to stammer the response, but this does little to alleviate Monk’s fury. “That’s me, Ellison. He is me, and he and I are Black,” the writer fumes. “These books have nothing to do with African American studies.” He taps one of his titles with an impatient finger. “They’re just literature.”
“He is me, and he and I are Black” is something like a thesis statement for American Fiction. Like the 2001 novel on which it’s based—Erasure, by Percival Everett—the film trades on the gap between this he and I, between how Monk is seen by others (as a Black novelist) and how Monk sees himself (as a novelist who is Black). It trades, too, on the distance between a writer who insists that his work is “just literature” and an industry that demands that any novel by a Black writer is just literature: a tool for social justice. This latter component is what distinguishes the film from its novelistic predecessor: Whereas Erasure has its sights set on political correctness (a very early-2000s bugaboo), American Fiction is largely about politics. If 2001’s Monk recoiled against the racial stereotypes favored by bleeding-heart liberals, his 2023 successor resents how Black writers are recruited for anti-racism, progressive politics, and invectives against what one white character calls “the carceral state.”
Some commentators have noted that American Fiction shares much in common with earlier works about Black tokenization in the arts: films such as 1987’s Hollywood Shuffle, which skewers the movie business; 1993’s CB4, which satirizes the music industry; and 2000’s Bamboozled, which takes aim at television. American Fiction belongs to a popular if loosely constructed genre we might call the “tokenism exposé”: works that reveal the pressures placed on minorities to be “authentic” (read: stereotypical) representatives of their identity group. As NPR’s Aisha Harris recently remarked, “Every era gets at least one or two notable social satires wrestling with the tension between Black art and commerce.”
Yet American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson, a former journalist who once wrote another viral tokenism exposé about the “racism beat” in American media, is also clearly a product of the year it was released. The film joins other 2023 send-ups of the literary landscape—R. F. Kuang’s novel Yellowface, Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans—in its remorseless ridicule of the progressive identity politics of the moment. These recent entries in the tokenism genre stand out from their predecessors because of the deep pessimism they bring to bear on their subject matter.
Jefferson, Kuang, and Taylor shine mortuary lighting on the post–George Floyd era, exposing how 2020 brought a reification of racialism in the publishing industry and academia. But compared with some earlier tokenism exposés—such as CB4, which concludes with its protagonist shedding stereotypes and finding success on his own terms—these recent works are decidedly more cynical about the possibility of escaping tokenization. Even as American Fiction, Yellowface, and The Late Americans offer withering portrayals of a race-obsessed culture, the works themselves can’t exit that world’s gilded orbit. These works succeed because the authors don’t try to extricate them from the web of the industry they so deftly lampoon.
Under the unsparing eye of Jefferson, American Fiction trusses and roasts the pieties of the contemporary publishing industry. Monk is the wrong kind of Black writer: an aesthete, inaccessible, disinterested in politics and tetchy about feel-good progressivism. From the point of view of the publishers who rebuff his advances, his great sin is that he is a silver-spooned, elite-educated Black novelist who doesn’t write gritty, digestible books about Black poverty. Everyone wishes Monk were more like his authorial nemesis, Sintara Golden, a silver-spooned, elite-educated Black novelist who does write gritty, digestible books about Black poverty.
Demoralized by the fallen state of African American literature, Monk dashes off a racist satire—which he titles My Pafology—that is chockablock with crass stereotypes, and demands that his agent send it off to editors as a half practical joke, half fuck-you meant to call Big Fiction on its penchant for pandering. To Monk’s surprise (and not inconsiderable horror), a major publisher buys the manuscript to the tune of nearly seven figures. Having written My Pafology under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, Monk spends much of the film adopting, to great comic effect, a street-soaked alter ego: Stagg is definitely a fugitive, maybe a murderer. He speaks in hard grunts and splits at the sound of sirens. He is precisely what Monk—the Harvard man, the son of a doctor—is not. “Raw.” “Urban.” “Authentic.” The right kind of Black.
At the center of Monk’s acrimonious relationship with American literary culture is the question of representation: namely, what gets to count as Black representation and who gets to count as a “Black voice.” In Erasure, the novelist professes “not to believe in race” but concedes that “the society in which I live tells me that I am black.” The social imposition of race is the primary crisis of Monk’s professional life: Editors say they want to publish Black writers, but their vision of “Blackness” is in fact quite particular, underwritten by a hidden rubric that curates what forms of Black experience are desirable and (which is to say the same thing) marketable.
In his superb new book on the publishing industry—appropriately titled Big Fiction—the Emory University English professor Dan Sinykin remarks that Everett’s primary target in Erasure is “a publishing industry in which agents, editors, booksellers, reviewers, academics, and writers are all complicit in conflating fiction with the authentic experience of race.” In Sinykin’s view, what Everett offers is not so much a rejection of the transformation of books into commodities but rather a rejection of the “constraining racial fantasies” that dominate mainstream publishing, an industry that trafficks in highly circumscribed—largely low-income and urban—representations of Black life. In other words, the kind of representations that tend to confirm and conform to rather than trouble and unseat racial stereotypes. “Look at what they publish,” Monk summarizes in American Fiction. “Look at what they expect us to write.”
And the problem isn’t just that publishing houses reduce Black novels to curios that get racially categorized—alongside other “exotic” texts—for the perusal of fascinated white audiences. American Fiction suggests that the increasing balkanization of literature into identity subcategories is indissociable from the creep of American narcissism. So-called minoritized audiences want stories that speak to their “lived experiences,” while upwardly mobile white audiences want stories that flatter their preconceived notions about those same minorities. In each case, identitarian literature fans the flames of self-obsession, reducing reading to either an act of racial mimesis or racial voyeurism. At one point in American Fiction, Sintara, the author of one of the pandering “Black experience” novels Monk detests, asks a mostly white audience: “Where are our stories? Where is our representation?” She doesn’t seem much troubled by the fact that the stories she wants to tell are the same stories good white liberals want her to tell. Black representation and Black fetishization turn out to be a horseshoe.
American Fiction isn’t just a satire. It’s a lament about the impossibility of making—or at least getting paid handsomely or becoming famous for—apolitical Black art. Monk grates against the encroachment of politics upon aesthetics, but his ethos can’t be accommodated within either the world of the film or the real world beyond it. The very idea of Black “art for art’s sake” sounds like a paradox, so habituated are we to associating Blackness with social critique.
Consider how reviewers have interpreted American Fiction’s subplots involving Monk’s recently divorced brother and his ailing mother: A number of critics have described the “tonal tension” between the film’s family drama and the more boisterous comedy that encases it. Rather than view this uneasy and sometimes awkward balance as a shortcoming, however, we might instead read this tension as part of American Fiction’s message. A movie about the struggles of a Black family that isn’t told as a racially charged melodrama would never be greenlit by film studios. Instead, that plot must be snuck into the racial satire like a child’s unwanted vegetables because it is the satire, not the family story, that brings liberal white audiences to the theater. Artistic neutrality, disconnected from the messy world of politics, might be a fiction, but it’s also a pleasant fiction, one that “marginalized” writers—Monk, Everett, and Cord Jefferson alike—are not often permitted to enjoy.
While Monk grapples with whether to cash in on his identity for professional success, June Hayward, the narrator of R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, decides to steal an identity to achieve that same end. A struggling white writer who daylights as an SAT tutor, June is deeply jealous of her college friend Athena Liu, a novelist—“Born in Hong Kong, raised between Sydney and New York”—who is catapulted into literary stardom almost immediately upon graduating from Yale. June thinks, “Publishing picks a winner—someone attractive enough, someone cool and young and, oh, we’re all thinking it, let’s just say it, ‘diverse’ enough—and lavishes all its money and resources on them.”
When Athena dies in a freak accident (a pancake is involved), June steals her manuscript and passes it off as her own, later adopting the equivocally Asian nom de plume “Juniper Song,” all the better to perform the titular act of “yellowface.” The self-described “racist thief” doesn’t get away with it, but June’s moral and professional shortcomings are perhaps not the core of the novel’s critique. Like Erasure and American Fiction, the real villain in Kuang’s tokenism exposé is a publishing industry that boils down the richness of human experience to a few readily commodifiable identity archetypes. And as with these other entries in the genre, Yellowface is marked by a thoroughgoing pessimism. When June is found out, the literary fraud is only temporarily defeated. She immediately envisions a strategy to transmogrify her humiliation into another fat book advance.
“I will craft, and sell, a story about how the pressures of publishing have made it impossible for white and nonwhite authors alike to succeed,” June muses. “About how Athena’s success was entirely manufactured, how she was only ever a token. About how my hoax—because let’s frame it as a hoax, not a theft—was really a way to expose the rotten foundations of this entire industry.”
To be sure, June ends the novel in monstrous fashion. But equally apparent is that she is a monster who has been made: a product of a contemporary literary culture that treats identities like ladder rungs, and that favors writers who are willing to practice the dark alchemy of converting racial pain into profit, shame into stacks of cash.
If a moral is to be won from Kuang’s novel, it is that literary conglomerates are a lot like casinos: The publishing house always wins. Recent years have seen them place their bet on politics. In our hyperpartisan nation, culture war sells, and one way to understand works like Yellowface is as a rejection of the lazy politics of literary fiction. June’s great epiphany is that the planet of publishing is held up by identitarian turtles all the way down: The limpid multiculturalism she takes advantage of and abhors is a form of identity politics, but so too is the white grievance politics she inevitably turns to when the jig is up. Even her planned memoir is not her own but a mirror held up to a squalid culture.
Like American Fiction and Yellowface, The Late Americans likewise lampoons the literary world’s narcissism and class-blindness, which have turned race into a fetish and poets into trauma pornographers. Set in Iowa City—and drawing on the author’s own experiences as an MFA candidate at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop—Taylor’s novel is a series of portraits of students and their affiliates. Its depiction of the identitarian limitations placed on writers is especially damning. Indeed, the novel is both a response to and a rejection of the racialized restraints that the market has forced upon Taylor as a Black novelist: “I’m pressured as a working-class African American to commodify my experience for prestige,” the author, who grew up in a family with relatives who were illiterate, said in an interview this summer. “I find that really suspect.”
A working-class, gay, white poet is the vehicle for The Late Americans’ novelistic broadside. Seamus despairs of the therapeutic turn of contemporary poetry, which he subjects to withering appraisal: “His classmates wrote only about the present and its urgency,” Seamus observes. “The very act of comprehension or contextualization was centered on the self, but the self as abstracted via badly understood Marxist ideology.” He decides that poetry has been reduced to “just a matching game, the poems simply cards.”
Literature more broadly has been reduced to a game of identitarian self-audit. But Seamus refuses to play. Reflecting on his poverty-stricken upbringing and his construction-worker father—a part-time actor who lost his foot to sepsis—Seamus muses “with a silly kind of meanness that if he were another kind of writer, a tacky writer, he could write about that. About the smell of his father’s rotting foot.” His classmates find his dense and technical poems—about abstruse topics such as Alsatian nuns—lifeless and problematic for their lack of social commentary. Seamus recognizes with bitterness that if he wrote about his traumatic childhood, those same peers “would call it brilliant.”
In this context, Taylor’s decision to cast what is perhaps the novel’s most autobiographical character as white counts as an act of defiance. It’s an attempt to loosen the racialized manacles placed on minority writers while also slyly highlighting the double standards of a literary culture that allows Black novelists to write poor white characters but balks at the inverse dynamic. Publishers expect Taylor to spin his working-class Black experience into profit, and instead he paints white poverty, creating a character who works as a mouthpiece with which to criticize the wispy values of those same publishers.
And like the author of American Fiction, Seamus is keenly aware that if he leaned into his gayness, his poorness, his “downscale” whiteness, the literary world would instantly regard him as a promising young talent instead of a try-hard hack. Yet the poet refuses to bend his artistic vision to the dictates of the moment, or the crass moralizing and trauma profiteering that characterizes it. Unlike Monk or June, who succumb to the tokenizing imperatives of the publishing industry, Seamus takes a stand for aesthetic autonomy and independence.
This is a goal that Taylor, Seamus’s own creator, cannot quite reach—which is no doubt the point. The message of this tokenism exposé is that no minority who aspires to be a successful writer can fully win this freedom. Even as The Late Americans features a character who struggles valiantly against tokenism, it is deeply pessimistic about the prospect of real-world authors resisting it in the long run.
As American Fiction winds to a close, Monk meets with a Hollywood executive who is interested in bringing his cash-grab novel to the silver screen with a new, more cinematic ending. After workshopping multiple final scenes, the novelist (who wants to reject racial caricature) and the director (who wants a racially cartoonish conclusion) ironically prefer the story to end the same way: Stagg R. Leigh is shot to death by a multiracial police force. When Monk realizes that he has at once pleased the executive and landed on a conclusion that realizes his own artistic vision, a strange look—confusion, wry wonder, a tinge of horror—passes across his face. It becomes apparent that his desire and the desire of the exploitative filmmaker are one and the same. That American Fiction ends by tying a decisive bow on the satire—without resolving its protagonist’s family struggles or girlfriend trouble—is a savvy narrative choice that only drives this point home: Monk and Jefferson both know what their audiences do, and don’t, care about. We came to the movie lured by the promise of race talk, not for universalistic depictions of familial fracas.
The lesson the tokenism exposé leaves us with—a lesson uniquely calibrated to 2023, a year in which pundits asked, again and again, whether we had passed “peak woke”—is that every writer is subject to the publishing industry’s racializing gaze, and every writer who craves renown will eventually bend the knee. In this genre, characters bristle against the insistence that the only novels worth writing are those that stand in for social justice, and the texts themselves twist against the progressive niceties of Big Fiction. But their authors also deliver these acerbic critiques with a wink, keenly aware that even as they lambast identitarian literature, they’re partaking in it, and even as they denigrate the sellouts, they’re cashing their checks.
One might be tempted to charge Everett or Jefferson, Taylor or Kuang, with hypocrisy. One might even argue—like the author of Yellowface herself has—that race satires place “all the focus back onto white people.” But their works seem to furnish their own defense. After all, what other choice do these authors have? The logic of the market is without remorse. Every minority’s story becomes a Minority Story in the end.