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- Title
BlacKkKlansman and the "Sheets of the Past".
- Authors
Baker, Jayson
- Abstract
As an adaptation of Ron Stallworth's 2014 memoir BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman (2018) intersects and conjoins multiple "pasts" to explain Black transcendence on the one hand and revitalizing white supremacist attitudes on the other. Lee's film tells the story of the first police officer in an all-white precinct investigating Ku Klux Klan recruitment strategies in the greater Denver area in the 1970s. Lee borrows Blaxploitation aesthetics, samples canonized Hollywood film, and incorporates citizen cell phone footage to distill and link eras of the nation's racialized past for contemporary viewers. These linkages report "Blacklashes," or how the visibility of Black leaders in the highest tiers of American democracy produces resurgent white supremacist thinking and behaving. To explain Lee's intertextual approach narrating contemporary race relations, the essay engages the work of Gilles Deleuze's "time-images," poststructuralist critiques, and critical race theorists. This article seeks to open up conversations about how "pasts," cinematic and real, operate on the American racial imagination.
- Subjects
LEE, Spike, 1957-; BLACKKKLANSMAN (Film); CELL phones; STORYTELLING; POLICE; MYSTERY fiction; MEMOIRS; IMAGINATION; THEORISTS; RACE relations
- Publication
Black Camera: The New Series, 2022, Vol 13, Issue 2, p282
- ISSN
1536-3155
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2979/blackcamera.13.2.14.