With American Fiction, Cord Jefferson crafts a hilarious and withering satire about an African American novelist chafing against an industry that limits Black storytelling to trauma and poverty narratives.
You know the kind of movies that American Fiction is responding to. Consider the civil rights and slavery dramas rushed out in the past decade after the rise of social movements like #BlackLivesMatters and #OscarsSoWhite or the wave of genre fare like Queen & Slim or Amazon’s horror series Them that are propped up as topical and important, because they peddle traumatic violence and give white liberals an avenue to feel absolved for having endured and empathized with such suffering.
