“You Must Never Be a Misrepresented People”: Spike Lee’s Bamboozled

Abstract

You’ve been hoodwinked. You’ve been had. You’ve been took. You’ve been led astray, led amok. You’ve been bamboozled. Malcolm XAs the means by which to examine some of the residual psychological and social effects of colonialism in the current social interactions between the dominant white culture and black culture in the United States, I will argue in this essay that Spike Lee’s fifteenth film Bamboozled (released in October 2000) confronts its audi­ences with the continuing but unacknowledged consequences of minstrelsy and mimicry in the United States as a postcolonialist slave society. My argument will precede from Tania Modleski who asks, Is it not the case that the threat of monstrosity – that is, of black monstrosity – has been present all along in ... film as a consequence of the decision to make it an allegory rather than to treat the situation of blacks directly? And has not the tendency of films from the very early days of cinema to cast white people in black face served a similar function – i.e., to suggest that blackness may be so monstrous it can only be signified but not directly represented? (118) Modleski argues that we need to examine “the function of mimicry on the part of the colonized people,” as well as “the function of minstrelsy” in the “life and art of the colonizer” (119). Toni Morrison has also called for studies that examine “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it” (11). Minstrelsy, as a manifestation of a colonialist slave system and its racist aftermath, is “a method by which [whites] may disavow – acknowledge and at the same time deny – difference at the level of the body; as a process of fetishism, it seeks ... to restore the wholeness and unity threatened by the sight of difference ... The concept of fetishism enables us to understand why minstrelsy has never really died out” (119). Moreover, as Luce Irigaray has argued about gender – an argument that is also applicable to race – “the fetish is precisely the means whereby [the] ‘lack’” that is both the cause and effect of the (mis)recognition of difference allows for the perpetua­tion of what she calls a “‘multiple belief’[that] serves to support the wildly divergent stereotypical associations that accrue around the fet­ishized body” (Modleski 119–20).

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