Undoing Hegemonic Erasure: Afro-German Berlin in Armin Völckers’s Film <i>Leroy</i> (2007)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that racism alongside the verbal and physical neo-Nazi violence perpetrated in Leroy (2007) against the film’s eponymous teenaged Afro-German male lead pervade Berlin’s cinematic topography, thus pushing against the city’s self-stylization as a cosmopolitan “open city” that is tolerant towards its ethnic minorities. I assert that in questioning Berlin’s self-presentation, Leroy – a youth film, ethnic romantic comedy, and Berlin film – is ambiguous: while it disrupts some stereotypes about black masculinity, simultaneously it also uses ethnic tropes. Furthermore, I maintain that, visually, Berlin is constituted as a multivalent space that both supports and perturbs Afro-German identity, while through the use of hip hop the film creates a sonic Afro-German Berlin community. Finally, I show that the film’s satiric concluding image of Berlin as a utopian, post-racist cityscape calls attention to cinema’s role in employing the same racist tropes it aims to undo.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".