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- Title
Doing the Right Thing? Toward a Postmodern Politics.
- Authors
Hutchinson, Allan C.
- Abstract
The article presents a comment by the author on the presidential address given by researcher Joel Handler in 1992 at the annual meeting of Law and Society Association. Spike Lee's motion picture "Do the Right Thing." It is an auteurial tour-de-force by way of a postmodern fable for the ages that is self-consciously perplexing and inconclusive. While focusing on the competing imperatives of the pacificism of U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King's assimilationist politics, Lee poses the more general and debilitating dilemma that faces those committed to decisive action in an opaque world. Lee seems to go further and contend that there is no way of knowing whether the attempt to "do the right thing," might turn out to be another way to "do the wrong thing." In his presidential address, Joel Handler stated that he was unimpressed by this cinematic portrayal of the political activist's existential predicament. In this research paper, the author tries to suggest the error of Handler's perspective by defending postmodernism as an effective and viable theoretical resource in a radical project of transformative politics.
- Subjects
POSTMODERNISM (Philosophy); SOCIAL change; HANDLER, Joel; SPEECHES, addresses, etc.; LEE, Spike, 1957-; DO the Right Thing (Film)
- Publication
Law & Society Review, 1992, Vol 26, Issue 4, p773
- ISSN
0023-9216
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/3053816