Raising Minstrelsy: Humour, Satire and the Stereotype in The Birth of a Nation and Bamboozled

Abstract

How much does blackface minstrelsy – the first form of American mass culture – share in modern depictions of blackness in popular television and cinema? What (if anything) can be done about the form’s disturbing legacy? Scholarly criticism over the past decade has grappled with these questions to uncertain effect and with limited success, sometimes attempting to recover a lost minstrelsy that might again produce performances that resist racist hegemony, sometimes reas­serting minstrelsy’s intrinsic racism and consigning its potential for the present to the scholarly practice of history. Importantly, Spike Lee’s recent film Bamboozled, motivated partly by American film’s albatross, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, addresses these same questions by cinematically staging American mass entertainment’s history of discrimination and intimate association with humiliat­ing minstrel stereotypes. Bamboozled, however, seems to embody the theoretical impasse in the scholarly debates, if only because the film enacts the very restaging of minstrelsy it apparently condemns.

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