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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".