Confronting the audience and breaking the fourth wall: why Black drama is getting meta

On stage and screen, self-referential works such as A Strange Loop and American Fiction are on the rise, with playful postmodernism a potent weapon in the fight against inequality

Officers storm a ballroom, releasing a& flurry of bullets that pierce through a Black man as he collapses in a& pool of his own blood. Monk, American Fiction’s neurotic protagonist, is unarmed, clutching nothing more than an ill-gotten literary& award. It could end here. Yet& –& spoiler alert! – in the final act of the& recent Oscar-winning film its writers take us& along for the ride as they& toy& with& reaching for a romantic reconciliation with Monk’s disgruntled ex-girlfriend or even fading to black with no resolution.

American Fiction, an adaptation of& Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, sees Monk, a middle-class Black academic, struggle to get his highly intellectual books published because they aren’t “Black enough”. In order to make some money for his family he writes Fuck, a Black working-class struggle narrative laden with violence, crime and pain. He instantly finds fame and fortune and is embraced by the cultural elite, who think he’s brave for being so authentic.