Legacies of blackface minstrelsy and contemporary American media: The political critique of spike lee’s <i>bamboozled</i>

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.