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

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 illgotten 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.

The film joins a class of recently lauded Black projects that are explicitly self-conscious. The term “metafiction” describes a genre of art where the work draws attention to itself as an imaginary tale. Whether it’s by breaking the fourth wall, zooming out and showing the set, or putting a story within the story to show the construction of narratives, these works across literature, television or cinema are characterised by an acute sense of self-awareness.

Last month, Michael R Jackson received an Olivier nomination for A Strange Loop, which has already won two Tonys and a Pulitzer in the US, for its fresh take on musical theatre. Chasing its own tail, the play follows its Black gay American protagonist, a Lion King usher called Usher, as he tries to write a play about a Black gay man himself writing a play that shows what it’s like to “travel the world in a fat, Black, queer body”. Jackson says he