Satire and Stereotyping in the Birth of a Nation and Bamboozled

Spike Lee's film Bamboozled (2000), cinematically stages American mass entertainment's history of discrimination with humiliating minstrel stereotypes which was first brought to film in 1915 by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. ‘Blackface' minstrelsy is a disturbing legacy that began as a tradition in the early 1800s on stage, with white actors using burnt corks to darken their skin and "allowing them to portray African-American slaves, usually as lazy, child-like providers of comic relief" (4). This eventually evolved into Vaudeville-style parody shows consisting of songs, dances and comic skits. This tradition represented an accepted way of looking at African-Americans and was the first form of American mass culture that created stereotypes. At the time it also eased white tensions about black America and the images served to justify notions of white superiority and power. Early American cinema relied on racial stereotypes and spectacles and it gained much popularity because it drew heavily from the tropes of vaudeville and minstrel shows, it was an effort to make the film-going experience comfortable. Bamboozled offers itself as a "status check" of the genealogy of American Cinema that begins with Griffith and develops through most of the genre and major technological innovation in film history. Bamboozled clearly compresses the aesthetic and socioeconomic history of racist representation and essentially is a tool to analyze the presence of this history in the present. It also destabilizes the possibility of constructing an "innocent" history, by rooting the film industry in the aesthetics of racism. Minstrelsy is politically charged and its influence has clearly continued to influence film historically and contemporarily. Bamboozled and Birth of a Nation share two common elements of satire and stereotyping.

Birth of a Nation

The Birth of a Nation relays a strong message of its white supremist vision through minstrelsy and propaganda which implicitly

Citations: (1) Lee, Spike, dir. Bamboozled. 2001. 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 2001. Bhabha, Homi K (6) Stanfield, Peter. "‘An Octoroon in the Kindling ': American Vernacular and Blackface Minstrelsy in 1930s Hollywood." Journal of American Studies 31.3 (1997): 407–38. (7) Birth of a Nation