Cards on the table. In fact, Erasure was one of the books that inspired The Blackademic Life. They both take up the niche topic of academic novels—stories about professors, students, and university life. Doing so requires getting into plot details of both works, including their endings. I tried to step outside of my perspective and evaluate the film on its own merits, and to consider how someone who had not read the book might experience it.
I ended up impressed with how Jefferson nimbly incorporates metafictional commentary on adapting novel to film. Ellison has authored novels on a variety of subjects and finds himself under pressure from critics, and from his agent Arthur John Ortiz , to write books that are more legibly Black in their content. Disgusted with the success of the novel and his own inability to sell his work, Ellison decides to write a satirical novel titled My Pafology under a pseudonym.
Though written as a farce to show the absurdity of racism in publishing, his novel unexpectedly gets picked up by a publisher, and Ellison is forced to decide if he should reveal himself as its author. In the meantime, Monk is dealing with some family drama. He comes from people entrenched in that social stratum W. Brown , are all medical doctors.
As a writer and professor, Monk is the oddball and the brunt of their jokes. Who wants to start? I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestors were slaves and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia, so the society in which I live tells me I am Black; that is my race. The man is literally from a family full of doctors. To the surprise of his agent, the change is approved.
He writes the book under the penname Stagg R. Leigh, and, frankly, I wonder if that reference even lands. Do Black Zoomers—or really any audience members—know anything about Staggolee Stack Lee as a mythological character? To me, that impossibility only reaffirms the relevance and value of the novel as a long textual form that allows for deeper intellectual exploration. What we do have in American Fiction in place of all that literary history and critical bickering is an impressive depiction of the writing process, this strange ventriloquism of inventing fictional characters and putting words in their mouths.
