If 2020 was the peak of culture’s great awokening, 2024 may be remembered as the year the dam finally broke. Within the past year, satirising the identitarian obsessions of the publishing world has almost become a genre of its own. It’s not just American Fiction — adapted by Cord Jefferson from the 2001 novel Erasure amid Hollywood’s sudden circa-2020 surge of enthusiasm for stories by and about people of colour. There was also R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, in which a white writer passes off the manuscript of her deceased Chinese-American friend as her own. And this week brings us Andrew Boryga’s Victim, a novel that pokes similar fun at the pieties of an industry that runs on equal parts white guilt and black trauma.
Victim tells the story of Javi, a young, bookish man from the Bronx who slowly awakens — with the encouragement of various well-meaning white authority figures — to the power of being powerless. Much like American Fiction‘s Monk, Javi’s greatest asset is his ability to tell privileged liberals the feel-bad stories they yearn to hear. The events of his childhood, from the death of his drug dealer father at the hands of a disgruntled associate to his best friend’s arrest, secure his admittance to a prestigious college — a ripped-from-the-headlines plot development based on the real phenomenon of a college admissions process that heavily incentivises applicants to produce narratives of minoritised suffering.
On campus, Javi hones his skills. “I peeped game and realized I happened to be uniquely equipped to thrive in it,” he says. He embellishes, obfuscates, appropriates, and reaps the rewards — even as part of him marvels at the absolute grift of it all. But he didn’t create the game, or write the rules; he’s just playing to win.
If stories like this centre on the marginalised people who manage to medal in the oppression Olympics, they are also implicitly about the game makers: people like Paula, whose self-proclaimed interest in black voices applies only if those voices are singing the right songs, parroting the prescribed lines, playing the assigned role. Both Victim and American Fiction zero in on this dynamic, exploring the precise moment when a white person’s unspeakable thought becomes sayable — if expressed by someone of another identity. “I know you want me to write about being poor and stuff,” Javi tells his high school guidance counsellor, who hastily and nervously corrects him: “I didn’t say that.” When Monk trolls his publisher by insisting on changing the book’s title from My Pafology to FUCK, an obsequious marketing executive enthuses that the new title is very, um…
“Black?” Monk says, dryly.
“That’s it, yes, that’s it!” the other man giggles. “I’m happy you said it, and not me!”
But unlike Monk, who watches in horror as his practical joke takes on a highly remunerative life of its own, Javi is more than happy to master the art of wielding power through the pretence that he has none. “I felt like a dominatrix,” he observes, after he skewers a white editor — who has just offered him a coveted staff writer job on the diversity beat at a Brooklyn magazine — as a gentrifier. It’s a moment that reveals the astonishing cynicism of the entire enterprise: the suffering, the degradation, the stories, are all part of a sadomasochistic farce in which everyone, including the self-consciously woke white editor with all his grovelling assurances that he intends to do the work, is just playing a role. Like the purveyor of trauma porn, the dominatrix takes your money and puts on a show of making you lick her boots — but as long as she stays in character, what do you care who she is when the costume comes off?
“Javi is more than happy to master the art of wielding power through the pretence that he has none”
In the past 10 years, as American centres of culture have become increasingly politicised, publishing has become increasingly convinced of its own importance as a driver of political and social progress. In the meantime, some critics (including myself) have observed that the initiatives meant to elevate writers from marginalised backgrounds have a funny way, in practice, of pigeonholing them. Instead of simply opening their doors to good stories told by a diverse variety of authors, publishers built a rarefied ghetto and got busy filling it with token writers telling token tales of trauma, oppression, injustice.
The result is not just a homogenised literary landscape, but a reading public that increasingly cannot grok that “diverse” writers do not, in fact, all look or act or think alike. This has long been a point of frustration for black writers whose interests lie outside the narrow realm of “Black stories” (an early scene in American Fiction finds Monk ranting over the discovery that his books are shelved in the “African-American fiction” section of a store, shouting: “The blackest thing about this one is the ink!”) But it has also ironically fuelled the phenomenon of racial hoaxsters in places like academia, where minority scholars who eschew minstrelsy find themselves passed over in favour of pretenders who play to stereotype. In a world obsessed with identity as aesthetic, a white woman in feathers and beads inevitably reads as more “authentic” than a Native professor in a three-piece suit.
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