The recently Oscar-winning film American Fiction – an adaptation of the novel by Percival Everett Delete by screenwriter and director Cord Jefferson – is a scathing look at the racial stereotypes prevalent in the publishing industry.
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In one scene, Theolonius “Monk” Ellison (played by Jeffrey Wright) attends a literary panel to promote his new book. The event is woefully under-attended. Monk then decides to join the crowd at the sold-out event hosted by acclaimed black author Sintara Golden. Golden is promoting her book We live in the ghetto. She gives a reading in an obviously black dialect, to the delight of the audience and Monk’s disapproval.>
In another scene, Monk and his literary agent are on the phone with a publisher who wants to buy Monk’s latest novel. The title is My Pafology. Monk wrote it as a joke, a satire on black stereotypes, but the publishers think it’s serious literature. At the insistence of his agent, Monk speaks to them in “black” dialect, in keeping with his pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh. It sounds “street.” It sounds “real.” The publishers love it.
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Such scenes abound in American literature. As an academic, intellectual, and author of several books, Monk is faced with the reality that he must fake the kind of book that “they want.” The satire illuminates the deeper issues surrounding what the book industry considers “authentic” and the burden it places on African-American authors.>
Monk resists the demand that he must “write black” and even “talk black” to be a speaker, that he must represent his racial experience. But the more he resists these pressures – by moving his books to a different shelf in a bookstore or by (initially) refusing to accept the publisher’s offer – the more the audience becomes aware that he is limited in his self-expression.
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“Look at what they’re publishing,” Monk says. “Look at what they expect from us.”>
Literary personalities>
Novelists like Monk and Sintara Golden satirize the reality faced by writers of color who are expected to perform a version of themselves in public and who, paradoxically, end up assuming a role—a supposedly “authentic” but in reality false role—for the benefit of readers, literary gatekeepers, and other industry players.>
Reduction in the name of “authenticity” is not unique to the American market. The global literary discourse also requires authors of color to produce seemingly “authentic” stories. They must then embody this “authenticity” in public.
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But are such narratives predetermined by race, ethnicity, and language? Who is an “authentic” author? The demand for “authenticity” – within literary culture in particular and postmodern culture in general – has become a problematic, paradoxical idea. Authors are now expected to represent an authentic experience – and yet the form that this authenticity takes is predetermined for them.>
There are apparently several reasons for this. One is that contemporary literary culture tends to equate the author with the worlds he creates in his books and expects them to match. Laura Mandell, assistant professor of English, argues that>
when we speak of “great literature” using an author’s name, we confuse people and texts, subtly reinforcing the unconscious idea that authors are literature, not that they wrote it. The ideology of authorship encourages such confusion while simultaneously imposing expectations on people about how they should behave.>
Another reason is that publishing a book automatically makes the author a public figure. Even if one explicitly opposes this, as in the case of Elena Ferrante, whose true identity remains unclear, this only reinforces the book’s ubiquity.
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Writers of color often use personas to navigate these expectations. At a literary event in Hong Kong a few years ago, I interviewed Junot Diaz about his views on his identity.>
Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The short and wondrous life of Oscar Wao, Recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant and professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His writing style is a mix of Spanglish, nerd jargon and taboo slang — perhaps a cross between Monk and Golden. Here is his answer, verbatim:>
I’ve always said to people, “You know, whatever your formula is about being Dominican, about being part of the African diaspora, about being poor, about being from New Jersey, about being an immigrant, whatever your formula is, please put me safely outside of it. Whatever your test is, I failed. Really, I failed. I’m so much happier not meeting everyone else’s formulas of not belonging, that’s my joy, even though I’m deeply rooted in my community, even though I feel a strong connection to my community.”
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My poor girlfriend feels like she’s living a crazy Dominican nightmare 24/7. In my world, everyone is fucking Dominican, so she’s wondering what the hell I’m doing with this guy. Despite all of these things, I’m still going to argue that no matter what simplistic formula people have about what’s authentic, I don’t want anything to do with a Dominican in New Jersey.>
Diaz’s uneven, mixed diction of street slang and academic jargon is a strategic achievement. His persona both acknowledges his racial and class background and his overcoming of that background through his literary achievements.>
However, he also makes it clear that he “remains authentic” and is still part of his community, even if he does not accept the “reduced formula” surrounding his identity.
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Like Monk in American Fiction, Diaz resists the idea of being pigeonholed into a particular category of racial or ethnic identity. At the same time, he embodies that identity in the way he speaks, like when Monk is asked to speak as “Stagg R. Leigh” on the phone. Even as he disparages the idea of being pigeonholed, he performs it.>
Another example comes from an interview with Madeleine Thien, the Booker-nominated author of Don’t say we have nothing. In contrast to Diaz’s prose, Thien’s prose is sparse and lyrical, focusing on small moments. And unlike Diaz, Thien lives her pigeonhole mentality in real life and uses it almost as a weapon.>
When I interviewed her about the culture of criticism in Canada, she also played a role, but in a different way. “I used to be frustrated and saddened by the misinterpretations of the works of authors of colour,” she said:>
(Critics) make such sweeping generalizations about a place and what they think of the literary culture there, when in reality they probably haven’t read a single book about Vietnam or whatever, you know, about Lebanon, about China, I mean, most people haven’t read a single novel set in China, and yet when they sit down to write that review, they don’t feel like they’re out of their depth. Because if you know you’re out of your depth, you can’t write a really sensitive and interesting review that comes from that place, you know?>
The paradoxical nature of contemporary literary discourse around “authenticity” requires Thien to flaunt her activism, her outrage, her identity politics, and her sense of responsibility to the rest of her ilk. It is the prescribed social self of the “real” author.>
But rather than claiming, like Diaz, that her “authenticity” is not up for debate, Thien speaks about her responsibility to society as a whole. She uses her identity and her power of representation (perhaps in some ways like Sintara Golden) and shows the outrage expected of her in the discussion about diversity.>
True to yourself?>
The idea of being true to oneself now extends to identity politics. It forces writers to produce a certain kind of narrative. It is not about writing what one knows, but about writing what only You know. Deviations make the work (or worse, the author) inauthentic – one of the last taboos of postmodern culture.>
In one of American Fiction’s later scenes, Monk and Golden are eating lunch in a gloomy room. They have been brought together as judges for a literary prize. Monk is curious about Golden’s disdain for his bogus novel Fuck and gently suggests that Golden’s work is guilty of the same pandering.>
The questions also come from the audience. How did she notice that her text was pandering? What did she find dishonest about it? And is she perhaps aware of the dishonesty of her own work? Is her pandering intentional?>
The film denies us the satisfaction of an answer. Golden simply returns Monk’s question, implying that his perspective is based on a position of academic privilege and that he is unaware of the realities of Black life. This is ironic in the context of the film, but it also confirms how Golden views her own role in the industry and what she means by “authentic.” Monk and Golden, like Diaz and Thien, both make choices around authenticity. Their opposing answers are both true.
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Sreedhevi Iyer, Lecturer in Creative Writing, RMIT University>
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.>
