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HARRY J. ELAM, JR. Spike Lee’s Bamboozled In an early scene from Spike Lee’s ‹lm Bamboozled, the ‹ctitious group, the Mau Maus, expand on the meanings of blackness as their rap song, “black is black,” from their “black album,” blares in the background. This ‹lmic moment serves as a signifying revision of the prologue that begins Ralph Ellison’s classic novel, The Invisible Man. As the Invisible Man drinks sloe gin, smokes reefer, and listens to Louis Armstrong sing “Why Do I Have to Be So Black and Blue,” he envisions himself in the midst of a black church service where the preacher delivers a sermon on the meaning of blackness. The minister famously intones, “my text this morning is the ‘Blackness of Blackness,’” and the amen corner chimes in with verbal agreement and support, “That blackness is most black, brother, most black.”1 Similarly, in Bamboozled, the new self-proclaimed ministers of culture and prophets of rap, the Mau Maus, smoke blunts, guzzle cognac, and pass around forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor as they discuss the ways in which blackness operates. Musing on the connotations and denotations of blackness, the Mau Maus proclaim that they from now on will spell the word sans the c, “B-L-A-K.” This linguistic resistance, both profound and absurd, underscores the potential power of language and reaf‹rms the contradictory meanings and meaninglessness inherent in constructions of blackness. The Mau Maus imagine this new spelling as a strike against white hegemony, a step toward “blak” self-de‹nition and determination. At the same time, this commission by omission of the c has no real material force and, in fact, only evidences the vapid black revolutionary politics of the Mau Maus. This parodic ‹rst glimpse of the Mau Maus, like the preacher’s speech in the prologue to Invisible Man, points out that blackness in its representation is always contingent, subject to the context and cultural and political codings of its use. For as the preacher in Invisible Man remarks, “Now Black is . . . an’ black ain’t.”2 346 Spike Lee’s highly intertextual, intellectually and politically provocative and commercially unsuccessful ‹lm profoundly questions historical and contemporary traf‹c in blackness within the American popular imagination . Lee argues that with Bamboozled he wanted to “show from birth these two great mediums, ‹lm and television, have promoted negative racial images” and that “racism is woven into the very fabric of American society .”3 In a satirical critique of the American commercial media, Pierre Delacroix, a black Harvard-educated television executive besieged and beset by his white boss to create a new black hit television show, masterminds a project that he believes in its racial excess will reveal to the white writers and producers their own racism. Delacroix’s boss Dunwitty (Michael Rappaport) demands that Delacroix, or Dela, develop a fresh idea that is authentically black. Dunwitty maintains that blacks are always at the cutting edge of fashion and commercialism. And clearly today with the global in›uence of hip-hop, as white suburban youth dress in baggy jeans, sport tattoos, and listen to rap music, blackness remains critical to the popular. In fact, black innovation fuels the popular. To Dela’s surprise, the project he creates, entitled the New Millennium Minstrel Show, a return to blacks in blackface smiling, singing, and dancing on the plantation, becomes a smash hit. Through detailing the rise and fall of this new black television show and its creator, Lee’s comedy condemns the culture industry and the white media establishment for its ability to co-opt the potency of blackness in popular culture, and its willingness to repeatedly portray blacks within stereotypical imagery. Yet this is not just a white thing. Lee castigates blacks who ‹nd themselves seduced and engulfed within this system and justify and rationalize their own relation to stereotypes. Dela is himself a stereotype. With his perfect posture, his affected gestures, his accent that borders on British but is a thing all to itself, Dela sends up the black middle class and their disaffection from the masses in a way that even E. Franklin Frazier could not imagine. In fact, Dela is so much a stereotype that few blacks in the audience can connect with him and his depiction. Thus, Lee’s critique of the black middle class through this ‹gure threatens to miss its mark because Dela engenders no empathy. Dela too becomes caught up in the fame and success he...

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