1 - Preliminary Notes for Reading Spike Lee; or A Black Studies Hermeneutic

A discussion of my interpretative approach to Spike Lee's cinema.

Show Notes

In this opening episode, I describe my interpretative frame for Spike Lee's cinema, focusing on the terms and imperatives Lee brings to cinematic practice - the burden and beauty of representing Black bodies, Black people, and Black life - and how that forms what I call a Black Studies approach to film. My interpretative frame, then, follows Lee's leading clues, but embellishes them with the African American intellectual tradition and its combination of aesthetics, ethics, and politics.

What is Spike Lee's Joints?

20-30 minute reflections on particular Spike Lee films, from School Daze up through Black KkKlansman - précis for a book-length study of Lee's cinema, reflections on a course I've taught a number of times at Amherst College and University of Maryland. In these podcast pieces, I pay particular attention to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality as they emerge inside particular films and in the history-memory of African American life. How does Lee's cinema think? How does sound and image help us understand representation of Black bodies, Black people, and Black life? What are Lee's innovations, what challenges does he present us with in sound and image? And how can we see questions of masculinity, gender and racial formation, historical violence, and institutional violence evolve across his decades of filmmaking?