Erasure

Content Warning: The source text discusses racism, violence, sexual violence, anti-Black biases, anti-gay biases, and suicide. It also includes racist and sexist slurs that the guide reproduces only in direct quotations.

Erasure is a metafictional satire of the stereotypical views that define and regulate African American literature and Black artistic expression. Monk is enraged when he visits a bookstore and sees that Juanita May Jenkins’s novel, titled We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, is a bestseller that is admired by critics and readers alike. This novel is about marginalized Black Americans and makes a spectacle of their misery, which infuriates Monk. The characters in Jenkins’s novel are plagued by lack of education, poverty, and criminality, and publishers consider this the only possible representation of the African American experience. While reading excerpts of this novel, Monk feels “the reality of popular culture” as a “real slap in the face” since it hits him that this is the only type of Black narrative that the American public expects and accepts (29). He personally considers the book idiotic and thinks of the author as “a hack” who does not know how to write well.

In contrast to Jenkins’s novel’s success, Monk’s newest book—which is a retelling of a Greek tragedy—is constantly rejected by publishers because they do not think it is “Black enough.