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Record W1998556325 · doi:10.3138/cras-s033-01-01

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

2003· article· en· W1998556325 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Jamie Barlowe

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Review of American Studies · 2003
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicRace, History, and American Society
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMimicryWhite (mutation)Argument (complex analysis)Movie theaterColonialismAllegoryRacismFifteenthHistoryFace (sociological concept)ArtAestheticsLiteratureArt historySociologyGender studiesClassicsMedicine

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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).

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.369
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.032
GPT teacher head0.336
Teacher spread0.304 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreReview

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations7
Published2003
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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