The name of Percival Everett’s twelfth novel Erasure (2001), upon which last year’s American Fiction, the debut film by Cord Jefferson is based, is ambiguous in ways that may not immediately seem obvious. A whole industry exists to draw attention to the cultural fields in which the roles played by minority literary, artistic or political figures have been forgotten, or erased, from history. English Catholics, black republicans, socialists, and Jewish professional athletes can all claim, with some justification, to having been excluded from narratives about their chosen professions. Jefferson’s film separates itself from its source material by trading largely on this definition of erasure, telling in the process a story about the unscrupulous practices of a culture industry willing to level the complexities of black life for a commercial success.
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