NO GPS | African-American Fiction? | Ep17

In this episode of NO GPS, Mez & Aharon discuss the Oscar-nominated film 'American Fiction,' directed & written by Cord Jefferson, featuring Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K. Brown, Leslie Uggams, Issa Rae & Myra Lucretia Taylor. The guys delve into the artistry of the film. They question the reasoning for making a film like this in 2024. Given that the film deals with similar themes and tropes of one-dimensional portrayals of Black characters in the mold of Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle & Spike Lee's Bamboozled. 

What we see in the film is the Obamesque desire for a type of negritude display of Black elite life. That is to say that the film gives in to the new Black(ish) want to be disabused of the notion of race, to be SEEN as they truly are. Yet this bad faith effort to escape the facts of life leads to many false starts and misunderstandings in American Fiction. The main character Thelonious Monk Ellison gets no respite in either his professional or personal life because of his resentment of the book publishing world as well as academia. The family melodrama, though, that the film is ensconced within shows the complexity of Black life that Black millennials have been starved to see reflected on movie screens. This is where we see the true genius of Cord Jefferson at work; namely, his ability to create portraits of Black family life that are discordant yet redemptive.

Lastly, the connection between Jeffrey Wright's Thelonious Monk Ellison and his portrayal of Basquiat was crystallized in the (paraphrased) line shared between the two films: "His art gives voice to the gutter." This line connects the two films intertextually - showing the full circle connection between the two characters and the artistic drive of Jeffrey Wright to play roles that are self-agental and not bound by societal conventions. This gives much deserved light and shine to the magnificent and often underappreciated film oeuvre of Jeffrey Wright. 

Recommended films to watch: Hollywood Shuffle, Bamboozled & The Inkwell.

Intro and outro song: Tequila No Chase by Aharon, https://open.spotify.com/track/03gfonQpnThqb1ONS52wAu?si=B5JuFKiiTCmySGtvUT5gKQ.

Recommended reading: In Defence of #blackaf's Celebration of Mediocrity by Aharon Joseph, https://nsjcp.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/95/37.