Does publishing] have a problem with black writers?

In the film American Fiction, black writers struggle to be heard unless they write about trauma. It’s the same in the UK, says Emma Loffhagen

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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.