35 GLOBAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES VOL 8, NO. 1&2, 2009: 35-44 COPYRIGHT© BACHUDO SCIENCE CO. LTD PRINTED IN NIGERIA. ISSN 1596-6232 www.globaljournalseries.com ; [email protected] LEGACIES OF BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN MEDIA: THE POLITICAL CRITIQUE OF SPIKE Lee’s Bamboozled
PATRICK NKANG, JOE KING AND PAUL UGO (Received 24, August 2010; Revision Accepted 3, September 2010)
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the extraordinary ways in which the America mainstream visual media have propagated and circulated racist myths which subvert the cultural identity of the black race. Using Spike Lee’s Bamboozled , the paper exposes the negative social stereotypes espoused by American entertainment media about blacks, and argues that Spike Lee’s film not only unravels that subversive Euro American rhetoric, but also doubles as an intense social critique of that warped cultural dynamic.
KEYWORDS: Blackface Minstrelsy, Racist Stereotypes and American Media.
INTRODUCTION Because slavery is the illuminating insight on this aspect of cinema in the founding historical relationship between black United States when he declares that “the fact that and white in America many will argue, lingers film has been the most potent vehicle of in subterranean form to this day (Guerrero 1993: American imagination suggests all the more 03). strongly that movies have something to tell us about the mysteries of American life” (xii). Film and the African-American Image American films then have a deep historical link with its social environment, providing us the As a form of social expression, the film medium profoundest social transcripts about American embodies significantly staggering amounts of society than historians, economists and other social truths . This very character of the film art professionals of any period could ever offer. derives from its peculiar ability to draw upon As Siegfried Kracauer has eloquently social realities for its narratology. From its outset argued, “what films reflect are not so much in the later parts of the nineteenth century, explicit credos as psychological dispositions— cinema art began by recording the daily life of those deep layers of collective mentality which common people hence it became a keen extend more or less below the dimensions of recorder of prevailing times in Europe and North consciousness” (Qtd in Schlesinger xiii). In other America. It is this power of cinema to capture the words, the recurrent themes, motifs, metaphors, tensions and pleasures of everyday life that and images that any art form embodies are Arthur Schlesinger (1979) refers to when he talks important, for they show the prevailing worries about the medium’s ability to offer us important and tensions of the people of such an age. For insights into “ the tastes, apprehensions, myths, example, the most insightful revelation of post and inner vibrations of an age” (xii). revolutionary struggle in Russia, the desolation And once cinema technology took shape as and solitude of post war Germany, or even the an established narrative art, it blossomed in the detailed workings of imperialism in non European hands of the Americans. Not only did the colonies such as Africa, Asia and South America Americans perfect the technology of cinema, the are best glimpsed through the films of such medium became for them a poignant instrument periods. Similarly, so do movies disclose to us for writing their national history in the global the inner and outer workings of American life and public domain. Schlesinger (1979) offers an hence racism will become an important narrative
Patrick Nkang, Department of Theatre Arts and Med ia Studies university of Calabar, Calabar, Nigeria. Joe king, Department of Theatre Arts and Media Studies University of Calabar Calabar, Nigeria. Paul Ugo, Department of Theatre Arts and Media Studies University of Calabar Calabar, Nigeria.
36 PATRICK NKANG, JOE KING AND PAUL UGO trope in that creative revelation. The inauguration war days to the insolent, criminal and free ‘brut of the race trope as early as the last quarter of Negro’ of reconstruction” (15). The entire black the 19 th century in American film was in keeping population including the small body of interests with the broader social and political context of the groups such as the NAACP and the press time and the peculiar tastes of the audiences for condemned Griffith’s work. African Americans which film was meant hence Jack Shadonian and other minority peoples became aware of how thesis that “all films are ultimately about negative and prejudicial the art of film something that interests and/or bothers the narrativized them. Instinctively, a new awakening culture they grew out of” (15). As soon as film amongst the African American population yielded its narrative potentials with the trial of emerged to reconfigure the black image in the Edwin Porter’s fifteen minutes feature (The Great American media. This awareness emerged Train Robbery), it was to the contending issue of mostly due to the fact that most colored difference between whites and freed black slaves characters in American movies were depicted as that it turned its attention to. “black buffoon[s] who appeared not to have the The first ever comprehensive feature to slightest intelligence. When the Negro was not be made in the United States for example was made an object of ridicule, he was portrayed as The Birth of a Nation , directed by D. W. Griffith in the devoted slave who knew his place” (Mapp 1915. This three hour epic with superb montage 16). technique was an amazing chronicle of the So independent black moviemakers began history of the United States beginning from to emerge to counteract and reconstruct such old reconstruction. The first feature to be shown in southern stereotypes. According to Thomas the white house, President Wilson Woodrow Cripps (1977), “ by the end of the great described it as “history written in lightening.” It depression, popular taste had become more opened on February 8 th , 1915 in Los Angeles and sophisticated and no longer was willing to accept on March 3 rd , at the Liberty theatre in New York so readily the old southern stereotypes that City. And although Birth was produced and Hollywood was offering. Black protests against directed by Griffith, it was actually a synthesis of these stereotypes were having their effects too” the work of three southerners at the time living in (05). The old Hollywood films, produced to suit the north. Griffith adapted the film script from prevailing white American values and tastes were Thomas Nixon’s anti black novels, The Leopard’s becoming unpopular. This was crucial for the Spots and the Clansman . It also employed the industry because a substantial segment of the ideas of Woodrow Wilson in his book Histories of industry’s patrons were African Americans. So by the American People . And according to Ed the late 1920s independent studios with the sole Guerrero, “Wilson took the view that emancipated aim of producing all black films emerged. Chief blacks were ‘Idlers’ who could become ‘insolent amongst these movement were the Lincoln and dangerous [and thus] wrote of reconstruction Company, Oscar Micheaux, the colored players, as a policy that ‘puts the white south under the Reol, Ralph Cooper, and many others. Finances heel of the black south” (11). It was precisely this and technical know how hampered these philosophy that The Birth espoused. The film companies, but a vigorous match toward implied that the African American, especially in reconstructing the battered image of the black the heydays of reconstruction, when American (usually played by whites in blackface) emancipated, was villainous, lustful for white had begun. women and political power, and above all, In spite of these efforts, a lingering racial ignorant. These were stereotypical southern tension still remains in the United States. Among conceptions of the average African American. To many other areas, the American entertainment be sure, The Birth did not invent these industry (Radio, TV, film) still reverberates with stereotypes, but it popularized them and these racial stereotypes of blacks only that the media motifs were to be deployed by other Euro have now “substituted new subtle stereotypes for American directors and producers of American old blatant ones” (Mapp 08). American films and television programs for many years. mainstream media, especially TV networks, still In describing the intent of the producers of circulate ridiculous images of the African race. The Birth, Ed Guerrero remarks that “As frank Most common is the black man as exhibitor of racial propaganda, The Birth of a Nation is an grotesque comic stunts. It is this perpetuation of elaborate construction of black stereotypes, the old comic motifs where blackness becomes a ranging from the loyal slave, the mammy, and the source of popular spectacle in the entertainment dancing bucks in the slave quarters of pre civil industry that Spike Lee takes on in his 2000 LEGACIES OF BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN MEDIA 37 release of Bamboozled. and reinforced by schools, organizations, family, our sexual lives, churches, institutions—all of The Politics and Aesthetics of an African- which produce racially structured society” (101). American Film Producer/Director: Spike Lee She then goes on to say that Spike Lee and his Shelton Jackson Lee, popularly known “...work represent a problematic through which as Spike Lee, was born on the 20th of March the political difficulties that inhere in African 1957 in Atlanta and later raised in Forte Green American cultural production in this moment can section of Brooklyn. Lee had an early grounding be usefully discussed” (98). This statement in the performing arts, as his father, Bill Lee, was highlights the great contribution that Spike and a jazz musician (perhaps this accounts for why his works provoke within the American cultural Delacriox’s own dad in Bamboozled is also a sector. For any one particularly interested in black performer). He attended Atlanta’s African American cinema tradition between the prestigious More House College and later earned later parts of the 20 th century to the present, his a degree in mass communication. He also works provide a mine of discourses. He is one of enrolled in the New York’s University Tisch the leading African American film directors who School of the Arts, earning a Master’s degree in have held their own with “thematically challenging film production. After this was a fulltime career in work” (George 84). filmmaking both in the feature and documentary formats. According to an anonymous biographer, Bamboozled : Critiquing Racist Mythologies in while there have been streams of African American Mainstream Media American filmmakers since the late 1920s, “none Ed Guerrero has observed that “opening has had the same cultural or artistic impact as scenes are often used to express an ideological Spike Lee.” Combining the multiple roles of frame or orientation through which the spectator writer, director, producer, and entrepreneur, Lee consumes the narrative ” (32). In other words, the “has revolutionized the role of black talent in very position a film takes is outstandingly evident Hollywood, tearing apart decades of stereotypes from the very beginning and this is indeed the case and marginalized portrayals to establish an arena with Spike Lee’s Bamboozled . Dunwitty’s meeting for Afro American voices to be heard his with the senior executives of CNS where he exhorts a movies are a series of outspoken provocative radical overhaul in the programming for the network socio political critiques informed by an is important. The scene illuminates the power of unwavering commitment to challenging cultural proprietorship (financing) and its enormous impact on assumptions not only about race but also about the content of the media. His vehemence about the class and gender.” He has directed a number of needed radical change in programming in CNS is not commercials and has evolved a pre retail outfit entirely his own. In his own words, the top hierarchy “Spike Joint” where apparels relating to his films of the network are “breathing down his back” to come are sold. But more than anything else, he up with something new and funny for its viewers. This acquired a 40 acre and mull film institute on the scene indeed tells us something about the history of campus of Brooklyn Long Island Jason Ankey to media financing/production and content implications support young African American filmmakers. in the United States. His works, mostly concerned with racial Top financiers of American mainstream minorities, are considered as radical and networks come from a long pedigree of Euro contrapuntal cultural texts amidst Euro American American supremacist class who shared and hegemony. His cinematic corpuses reveal him as believed in the age old mythic lores about innate a politically radical and progressive filmmaker. In Negro capacities. It is these cultural archetypes, an interview with Salim Muwakhil, he framed the which usually circulate among middle class political slant of his movies by saying “someone American media audiences that network owners has to force America to come to grips with the with an eye for profit permanently explore and problems of racism” (Qtd in Lubiano 101). deploy in their productions. Thomas Cripps for Though Wahneema Lubiano, African American instance has noted this influence of capital in feminist is critical of the uncritical celebration of culture production in the United States, tracing it Spike Lee by the American press and academics, as far back as the late nineteenth century. she nonetheless acknowledges the issues which According to Cripps, “unfortunately for the he takes on in his films. She agrees that “what Negroes, whites slowly acquired technical and has not changed in the history of race in the financial control over the motion picture industry United States is its centrality within culture, the and combined the many tiny studios into a importance of it to our socialization as produced nationwide system. Blacks all soon but 38 PATRICK NKANG, JOE KING AND PAUL UGO disappeared from the screen” (08). When they made them forget their troubles, and what they did appear, they followed the old southern believed about their past” (xxi). In other words, stereotypes. As a form of social protest then the popularity of film and television programs Bamboozled is concerned with “what it means to privilege insights into “the subtleties of mass be a black entertainer in a white society where prejudices”; they tell about the state of mind of almost all avenues of distribution are controlled people at a certain epoch. The Mantans’ by white conglomerate whose idea of what’s popularity in Bamboozled thus signifies an black are profoundly different from those of black enduring longing for black buffoonery by the artistes” (Park 01). American media audience, and indeed The tradition of ownership influence has illuminates the reason de’tre for why the US continued to the present when the combined media keeps recycling those images almost a forces of network owners, unchallenged by black century and half after slavery. Lee’s own finances, still influence the appropriation, re statement about the motivation for the film spurning and delivery of old stereotypes of black corroborates this point: “Being a black man in this images in the mainstream media. Television and country, and seeing how we’ve been depicted on film maybe too distinct media but they share the television and film, this film has been inside of me same quality of being able to capture both image since I started watching television and going to (sight) and (voice) sound. The prevailing the movies” (Anonymous Review). Till date, dominance and perpetuation of prejudicial prime time TVs still proliferate stock images of images of blacks on the small screen (TV) is thus blacks and such programs are popular with the only a muted form of the age old influence of audiences especially white middle class sponsors on the content of film. Current Americans. This lingering taste is an echo of the Hollywood films still carry the old black surviving passion of white American for black stereotypes —the Patriot, the Family Man, The spectacle that dates back as far as even the Legend of Baggar Venice and more. lynching theatres of the mid nineteenth to the As social text then, Bamboozled provides early twentieth century America. deep insights into the sociology of the American As creative cultural products, African society. An anonymous reviewer of the film American films are therefore metaphors for the argued that the point the film makes is “that larger socio political experiences of the colored attitudes haven’t changed, they’re merely people in the United States. Bamboozled disguised by political correctness” (01). James particularly narrativizes the recurrent ways in Berardinelli puts it blankly; “American TV viewers which black culture is repeatedly appropriated are fundamentally racist and that the and subverted to negative ends because of racist entertainment industry collaborates by providing inclinations in the United States. This is what Ed entertainments that emasculates blacks” (02). Guerrero hints at when he declares that black This stinking indictment comes out quite clearly in culture is usually “relentlessly co opted, emptied Spike Lee’s Bamboozled . When the black of its social meaning and sold by the protagonist, Delacriox, under the pressure of his entertainment industry as the latest fashion or boss, drums up the Mantan New Millennium fad” (07). This is quite evident in Bamboozled . Show, tailored after the old southern minstrel Although it is Delacriox who initiates the Mantan blackface shows, his hope is that his bosses will concept, his boss (Dunwitty), complemented by consider it offensive and then fire him. But when the efforts of a Finish director/cameraman, his boss, Dunwitty, swallows his bait and the completely distorts his concept by exaggerating CNS moguls are all for the concept, he imagines it. Delacriox’s tantrums about the that public outcry will stymie the continuation of inappropriateness of the show’s content are the show by the network. But alas he is mistaken unheeded because Dunwitty knows the audience as its first airing receives gleeful public approval for whom he’s designing his TV show—an and great acclaim from the press. Before long, audience with a prolonged longing for archetypal the shooting location for the show is a beehive of black entertainment. This managerial maneuver fans all adorned in black cork—the outstanding indicates the widely held view that film and TV marker of the “Mantans.” moguls in the United States have “increasingly This inadvertent popularity of the “Mantans” tried to reflect conservative middle class values unearths something profoundly inherent in the and strict racial codes of the time to guarantee American media audience. According to O’ profit from there as well as offset the cost Connor and Jackson, films usually “tell us what increased capitalization and consolidation” made people of other decades laugh or cry, what (Guerrero 17). Both at the level of production and LEGACIES OF BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN MEDIA 39 consumption, there exist a recurrent cycle of fish, and oysters and so forth to sell as a way of entertainment tastes in America—the one earning extra to earn money. suitable to white America at the expense of the Drawing from the reports of Thomas De African Americans. Voe, Lhamon explicates on how black slaves In teasing out the dangerous social hired by butchers, performed dances and songs critiques embedded in Bamboozled , it is crucial to for a fee (7); something they’ll naturally do for trace the genealogy of blackface minstrel in the mere entertainment in the plantations anyway. United States because that history helps Usually in twos or threes, the performers danced illuminate the peculiar mimicry slant that Spike on top of boards called shingles (a kind of Lee deploys in the film, especially as a counter improvised make shift stage), sang comical cultural discourse. As the main activity of slaves tunes, and accepted offerings from the public. was labor, they spent a large amount of their time When there was no money they accepted eels in plantation farms tending cotton, coffee, sugar (fish) in lieu of money. They generated sounds and other crops. And though extricated from tapping and clapping their feet and playing thousands of miles away from their original instruments made locally from plantations called homeland, they were not completely uprooted banjos. The Catherine market was thus a unique from their culture. In their spare moments they social space where “Citizens and slaves mingled found time to recreate and amuse themselves to gather, perform, and learn the stylistic gestures within the plantations. Inevitably, they turned to that sorted out their problems. It was an urban their cultural memories for fun, which came in the edge and a nexus, a determinative cultural valve form of dance and songs. As plantations were sorting our nutrients and waste” (Lhamon 8). one of the rare areas for inter racial interaction, Both white and blacks loved the black these cultural expressions provided amazing performances and they showed their support, exotica to Euro American slave owners at the love and enchantment through the tokens they time. Instinctively, some white slave owners threw on the players. began to relish and even patronize these cultural Before long, white theatre performers forms exhibited by blacks within the plantations. adapted this popular entertainment into their Eric Lott has noted these kinds of early inter repertory for greater appeal. As Lotts puts it “The racial contacts that fertilized the growth of outsider comes to teach the insider. The insiders minstrel imitation amongst Anglo American master the gesture themselves; in time, they theatre troupes. He reports from the New York claim to do them better than the outsiders” (13). clipper a certain Billy Whitlock, a banjo player As the white adaptors were not black in color, with the Dan Emmett’s Virginia minstrels who they had to simulate blackness if their shows used to “quietly steal off to some Negro hut to were to remain close to the originals. So to the hear the darkeys sing and see them dance” (50). blackening up tradition did the performers all So also was Ben Cotton, a performer in turn. According to William Mahar, “The primary Mississippi, who used to sit and perform with convention that identified the minstrelsy show as blacks in front of their cabins. entertainment was the burnt cork make up” (01) And plantations were not the only inter and a number of reasons have been advanced racial contact zones from where black for this blackening up but they fall beyond the performance culture sifted into white culture. purview of this paper. Apart from black festivals, churches and theatres As the defining relationship between (where people like Ira Aldridge, the renowned blacks and whites during this period was that of black Shakespeare artist), there was what slave and master, inferior versus superior, Lhamon Jr. calls the “Catherine Market street laborer versus employer, these disparities soon culture.” We mention this market and the found their way into the blackface minstrelsy performances that were contemporaneous with it shows. According to Mahar, “the combination of because the performances we see in burned, pulverized champagne corks and water Bamboozled are prototypes of the Catherine (Sometimes petroleum jelly or a similar Market tradition. The Catherine market, located in substance) served as a racial marker announcing the seventh street of the seventh ward of New that a single actor or an ensemble offered what York, was not a slave market. Rather, it was a were selected aspects of (arguably) African market for the exchange of goods and services. American culture to audiences interested in how Here, slaves, mostly from Long Island, who took racial differences and enslavement reinforced leave from their masters for a number of days distinctions between blacks and Americans” (01). came with wares such as roots, berries, herbs, So although Lotts advises that it is to the North 40 PATRIC K NKANG, JOE KING AND PAUL UGO that we must turn to in questing for the origins of hired by CNS network; and as blackface blackface minstrelsy, when it did emerge, performers made their way from stage to the Southern prejudices permeated it. Fredrick screen , so will the two black performers transit Douglass, denouncing the pro Southern from the street to the tube (TV). Spike Lee’s inclination for such minstrel groups as the Bamboozled thus offers a beautiful visual “Virginia Minstrels”, the “Christy Minstrels” and catalogue of pop culture from the Jacksonian age the “Ethiopian Serenaders,” described them as to the mid twentieth century. “Filthy scum of white society, who have stolen But Spike’s deployment of the blackface from us a complexion denied to them by nature, motif emerges from a thorough grounding in the in which to make money, and pander to the very logic of colonial mimicry. According to Homi corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.” Bhabha “mimicry emerges as the representation Douglass did believe that blackface of a difference that is itself a process of entertainment “compromised the search for racial disavowal.” In this sense “The success of colonial harmony and treated differences in race and appropriation depends on a proliferation of status as a subject of ridicule” (Mahar 7 8). The inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic blackface shows degenerated from their earlier failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance benign and harmless cultural exchanges to and menace” (126 127). It is a form of cultural platforms where white racial subjectivities were politics that attempts to show that the colonial worked into them. And this trend was to paradigm is incapable of being a cultural model. permeate and pervade all white cultural The mockery of blackface in Bamboozled then productions from the late nineteenth century becomes a powerful logic of disavowal of the onwards. Lotts puts it succinctly when he says colonizer’s imperfect and subversive mimicry of that the minstrelsy template culled from the indigenous cultural forms. Catherine Market “survived transatlantic crossing An unmistakable cultural resonance in the and held sway both south and north of the film that also doubles as a poignant social Thames. It held for the traveling minstrel show in critique is the peculiar design of the Mantan New metropolitan and frontier venues. It survived, Millennium Minstrel Show. The setting, costume even showed the way for, silent and talking films. and make up, characterization, music, dance, It was popular on TVs in the fifties and even now and spectacle of the show are reminiscent of the organizes much of MTV” (05). early blackface minstrelsy shows of antebellum It is this cultural history of the blackface America. Recorded in a proscenium theatre, the minstrelsy and its subversive Euro American setting is a watermelon patch on an Alabama adaptation and deployment that Spike mimics to plantation. This set, according to Paula Massood, score his point in Bamboozled. When the film “Resembles a southern plantation very much like opens, we find two itinerant black performers in the idyllic setting from early vaudevilles or from New York called Manray and Dowark (Savion the black cast musicals, such as Vincent Minelli’s Glover and Tommy Davidson). But these two Cabin in the Sky produced in Hollywood between street performers adopt almost all the key 1929 and 1943” (207). It is here that the elements of the “Catherine Market” paradigm. As Mantans, supported by other stock black slaves left their dingy plantation aboard to the entertainment characters such as Rastus and Five points Catherine Market square, so do Sambo , and backed by a band called the Manray and Dowark leave their scruffy habitation Alabama porch monkeys (played by the Roots), in the Manhattan ghetto to the city center in New are seen “cavorting and lazing around their water York; as the slaves bore their shingles for melon patch (Wright 02). The two act out long performances, so do Manray and Dowark roll held beliefs about blacks popularized in the their mobile stage with them; as the slaves antebellum south, what Donald Bogle has danced and made sounds by clapping their feet, referred to as “Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies so does Manray create his own melody from tap and Bugs” (1989). dancing; as whites gathered to watch the cultural These categories usually include chicken exotica of the slaves, so do New Yorkers swam stealing, crap shooting, watermelon eating, slow to watch these two street performers; as the talking, laziness, gin drinking etc. (Sampson 10 & slaves took offerings or eels from their watching 24). These stereotypes implied that a black slave audiences, so do the two black New Yorkers could never resist water melon; that the collect tokens from their white New Yorkers; as plantation was a cherished place of pleasure for the Negro performers were hired by the butchers the slave; that the slave was complacent with for “a penny extra” more, so will the Manrays be serving his white master and so on. But as a form LEGACIES OF BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN MEDIA 41 of cultural critique, the present day setting of the cultural memories deployed to a political end. Mantans suggests that little has changed in The footage function precisely in the same America. The blackface Mantan Show and the manner in which Grainge argues that “the surprising and ironic popularity that trails it in the negotiation of memory,” especially in the cultural film set in the America of the Twenty First sector, “describes the echo and pressure as it is Century underscores Paula Massood’s view that configured in the present based struggles over “what might appear as innovative in urban the meaning of lived experience.” In this context popular culture actually has deep roots in the then memory “ is seen as a political force, a long and perhaps forgotten history of American form of subjugated knowledge that can function cinematic, televisual, and theatrical as a site of potential opposition and resistance ” representations” (208). It is a subtle reference to (2 3). the recurrence of mythic conceptions of the The sponsors of the Mantan Show in African American that continues to circulate the Bamboozled also provide other insights on the American socio cultural ambience for more than dimensions of racist echoes in the United States. two centuries and half. The advert by producers of a two liter bottle of As a way of engaging the contemporary malt liquor drink tagged Da Bomb drops a hint on political, economic, cultural, and social existence the widely held notion of black hyper sexuality. in post civil rights America, Bamboozled The ad depicts black masculine characters and succeeds precisely in enunciating Massood’s bitchy black women exhorting the use of Da point through the visualization of archival footage Bomb as they claim it invigorates sexual of African American images in the US media performance. The ad thus is a powerful reference since the last quarter of the 19 th Century to the to the persisting conceptualizations of black present. Rob Blackwelder corroborates this point hyper sexuality. The hyperbolization of black when in his review of the film he states that, “the sexuality had begun soon after slavery. The logic dizzying array of historical footage edited into the behind this popular myth was that the children of film showing blacks exploited in showbiz certainly the loyal slave (Uncle Tom), once free, became help makes his point, as does the extensive hyper virile (men) and bitchy (women). This collection of racist antiques ” (03). These clips notoriezation of the African American figure , what of American entertainment history and the Wiegman calls “feminized docility” and “hyper pejorative semiotization of the Negro in it run as masculinised phallicity” (96) of the black subject far back as the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the 1903s became a widely circulated social myth and it through The Birth of a Nation in 1915 and later accounted for most of the lynching orgies that TV comedies beginning from the 1950s up to the were prevalent between the later parts of the Good Times of the 1980s. This visual history nineteenth to the early parts of the twentieth articulates a repetition of years of black century. This legendary phallocentricism of the stigmatization in America’s cultural sector. black male was reproduced in American cultural In arguing for the apprehension of the use circuits such as theatres, films, novels, dramas of historical clips in the film as an articulation of and comic books. echoes, we draw copiously from memory studies And while we agree that Bamboozled is a and its connection to film. Paul Grainge for vehement agitation against the persistent and instance has argued that “as a technology able to pervasive stereotyping of the African American, picture and embody the temporality of the past, the film does not spare the black wo/man for his cinema has become central to the mediation of or her complicity in these continued echoes of memory in modern cultural life” (01). Film stigmatization. According to Andrew O’Hehir, becomes a cultural tool bearing popular memory “Lee also suggests that blacks have become as distinct from public history. Even though conscious and unconscious collaborators in the history and memory are intertwined in some perpetuation of these stereotypes and must bear sense as both concern the knowledge and some responsibility for it” (01). The Mantans is an interpretation of the past, memory is different in entertainment concept initiated by a black the sense that “it draws attention to the activation American (Delacriox) working with the white of the past as they are experienced in the middle class; the stars of the show are two present” (Grainge 01). And memory functions in African Americans (Manray and Dowark); the cultural texts such as films in very peculiar ways. excited audiences who cheer on with cork It becomes a strong factor in socio cultural and colored faces are mostly blacks. When the advert political struggles. This is how we view the for the show’s audition is put out, it is blacks that archival footage in Bamboozled. We see them as flock the venue with different black stereotype 42 PATRICK NKANG, JOE KING AND PAUL UGO performances—Aldridge, the Negro pastor, horn caricatures in contemporary cultural productions piping reminiscent of slave “doings” in in America as suggested in Bamboozled . To be plantations, etc. clear, we do not suggest that Bamboozled as a This complicity of the black American creative piece is itself an echo (an argument that Lee points at in the film is usually not which can possibly be pulled). Rather, we argue unconnected with economic gains. Many African that the scenarios it presents are mimicries (a Americans prostitute their talents for profit from form of sign posting) of contemporary echoes of Euro American art sponsors and patrons and this cultural racism in the United States. The film, dates back to as far as the early parts of the through its reproduction of cultural artifacts, helps nineteenth century. Eric Lotts for instance has us understand the current experiences of the made reference to Thomas De Voe’s reports of African American as s/he engages with the slaves in 1815 from Long Island who on being society where s/he lives. What we see in the film granted short leave by their masters “were ever therefore is only refractions from the reality of ready” to perform Negro “Sayings or Doings” for daily experiences of African Americans in the US. extra money in public (41). These types of What Bamboozled does then is to invoke and performances, as I have illustrated earlier, were play on what Yearwood Gladstone (2000) refers later to be appropriated by earlier Anglo to as “cultural memories” through narration, to American theatre performers into their repertory protest a dimension of racism which manifests using burned cork on their faces to simulate itself in very congealed forms in American blackness. mediascape. The film functions as “a kind of It is the recurrence of such black American visual testimony or evidence” (Smith Michelle complicity in his/her stigmatization in the twenty 162) to the enduring structures of domination and first century that the film hints at. This is evident racism that still pervade the American society. In in the attitudes of Delacriox and the two Mantan many ways then, we argue that Bamboozled performers. Dela, as he is popularly called in the essentially triangulates what Cynthia Lucia refers film, smiles as huge cheques from the network to as “race, money and media” in contemporary come his way and the lives of the two America. entertainers changes dramatically from ghetto We end this paper with a rather long personalities and impecunious roving artistes to quotation which, in our opinion, captures the true big time New Yorkers with a luscious apartment, essence of the production of Bamboozled : “What fame and money. These economic gains often would be desirable in future cinematic blind most African American entertainers to the inscriptions of slavery would be the production of cultural treachery they pose to their own race. black and other independent features that artfully This is another form of echo but one that historicize and politicize the issues in a way that resounds from within the precincts of the black not only reveals slavery’s past but at the same community itself rather than from outside, what time, by allegory, allusion or otherwise, David Molden (1993) calls “ Black on Black communicates its relevance to Americans today” Shame.” (Guerrero 35). This statement provides a black cinematic agenda within which we can CONCLUSION authoritatively situate Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. In her work, Black City Cinema: American The film not only historicizes but also politicizes Urban Experience in Film, Paula Massood calls distinctive cultural memories of Africa American attention to Mikhail Bakhtin’s argument about the experience within the field of media production in powerful link between the film text and the actual the United States. world of reality. Bakhtin acknowledges that there is a difference between the world outside and the WORKS CITED. one created in the film text. But the former feeds on, and relies almost entirely on the latter for its Brooks, Xan. “Bamboozled Review.”Sight and depictions. 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