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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 founding historical relationship between black and white in America... many will argue, lingers in subterranean form to this day (Guerrero 1993: 03).
Film and the African -American Image
As a form of social expression, the film medium embodies significantly staggering amounts of social truths. This very character of the film art derives from its peculiar ability to draw upon social realities for its narratology. From its outset in the later parts of the nineteenth-century, cinema art began by recording the daily life of common people hence it became a keen recorder of prevailing times in Europe and North America. It is this power of cinema to capture the tensions and pleasures of everyday life that Arthur Schlesinger (1979) refers to when he talks about the medium's ability to offer us important insights into " the tastes, apprehensions, myths, and inner vibrations of an age" (xii).
And once cinema technology took shape as an established narrative art, it blossomed in the hands of the Americans. Not only did the Americans perfect the technology of cinema, the medium became for them a poignant instrument for writing their national history in the global public domain. Schlesinger (1979) offers an
illuminating insight on this aspect of cinema in the United States when he declares that "the fact that film has been the most potent vehicle of American imagination suggests all the more strongly that movies have something to tell us about the mysteries of American life" (xii). American films then have a deep historical link with its social environment, providing us the profoundest social transcripts about American society than historians, economists and other professionals of any period could ever offer.
As Siegfried Kracauer has eloquently argued, "what films reflect... are not...