BLACKFACE, ‘REDFACE’
BLACKFACE, ‘REDFACE’

Summary/Abstract: The present paper proposes to explore the condition of the ‘cultural schizophrenic’ in terms of the relation between the commodification of the ethnic Other and racist politics in the larger context of American entertainment, examining at the same time the complicitous relationship between racism, capitalism and the history of film and television. Blackface involves commodification of the black Other as well as the whites’ ideologically-driven definitions of blacks. The paper will analyze two films that draw on the tradition of blackface minstrelsy: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) that uses minstrel show conventions for racist purposes and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) that exposes those conventions as well as the complicity of film, television and advertising in the racist history of the United States. ‘Redface’ involves again the whites’ ideas of what it means to be Indian, the colonizers’ definitions of the colonized, the commodification of the Indian Other. Beyond that, the paper will also consider the Indian Other’s conscious, deliberate commodification of his own exotic image, moreover, his using the whites’ commodifying him to his advantage in Sherman Alexie’s film The Business of Fancydancing (2002). Furthermore, if white people stereotype the ethnic Other and commodify its body and cultural products, Alexie, in turn, ‘delights in stereotyping Anglos’. While clearly aware of the drama of the ‘cultural schizophrenic’, Alexie presents humor not as device of racial oppression as in blackface minstrelsy, but as powerful political tool: in his view, humor, performance, play represent creative-subversive acts and means of cultural survival for American Indians, of making profit, gaining power and political voice, of joining the culture rather than be a separate part of it. It is in performance that the two cultures become one.

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