Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled

The Film Theory in Practice series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of film theory with interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. The third book in the series, Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled, offers a concise introduction to Critical Race Theory in jargon-free language and shows how this theory can be deployed to interpret Spike Lee’s critically acclaimed 2000 film Bamboozled. The most common approach to issues of “race” and “otherness” continues to focus primarily on questions of positive vs. negative representations and stereotype analysis. Critical Race Theory, instead, designates a much deeper reflection on the constitutive role of race in the legal, social, and aesthetic formations of US culture, including the cinema, where Bamboozled provides endless examples for discussion and analysis. Alessandra Raengo’s Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled is the first to connect usually specialized considerations of race to established fields of inquiry in the humanities, particularly those concerned with issues of representation, capital, power, affect, and desire.

Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled offers readers a rigorously researched analysis of Spike Lee’s challenging film rendered through the multi-focal lens of Critical Race Theory. Raengo argues for the usefulness of engaging Film Studies through an understanding of blackness as a complex constellation of discursive modalities that extend across scholarly fields and that cannot be reduced to simplistic frameworks of essentialism. She then realizes her arguments in an eloquently written analysis of Bamboozled that considers it as a visual, an aesthetic, and a fundamentally political text that demands viewer engagement on multiple levels. It is an exciting addition to scholarship seeking to ask new questions about race and American film., Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled carries off a feat we don’t expect of an ordinary textbook: it delivers a clear, comprehensive introduction to a complex body of scholarship without ever draining the latter of nuance, force, or political urgency. This beautifully written book is essential reading not only for teachers and students who want to adapt the insights of Critical Race Theory to a concrete practice of analyzing film and video images, but for anyone who seeks a better understanding of the racialized structures of power and vision that ricochet between legal, political, and aesthetic forms of representation—and how to read them in everyday life. And really: who doesn’t?

Alessandra Raengo teaches in the Moving Image Studies doctoral program at Georgia State University, USA. Her research focuses on blackness in the visual and aesthetic fields. She is the author of On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value, and coordinator of liquid blackness, a research project on blackness and aesthetics.