Black Cinema As A Site Of Resistance: Decoding "the Spike Lee Discourse

Ever since Black Cinema emerged as a new form of cinematic experience at the early stage of cinema itself, it has undergone continued existence, development and growth and has evolved more distinctively as a powerful oppositional discourse against the mainstream film industiy known as ollywood.?The thesis is an investigation of the politics of representation in contemporary Black Cinema with specific reference to the African American filmmaker Spike Lee and his three major films: She c Gotta Have It (1986), Do the Right Thing (1989) and Girl 6 (1996). Its aim is to enrich our knowledge of African American filmmaking as an alternative and autonomous arena through demystifying and deconstructing Hollywood's omnipotence and deepen our understanding of Afrocentric values, especially as they are articulated in the cinema. Methodologically, the thesis is heavily dependent on textual analysis and it draws on several lines of thoughts concerning race, gender and ethnicity. In an effort to examine and evaluate the Spike Lee discourse? the thesis mainly focuses on the following questions: how has Lee strategically challenged and transformed Hollywood's logic to make his films a powerful site of resistance? How does the filmmaker use the aesthetic values of Black cultural traditions and what expressive elements have distinguished him as a representative of contemporary Black filmmaking since the 1 980s' What political and commercial strategies has the filmmaker employed to transform his marginalized position in the terrain of popular culture? The thesis further complicates its arguments by exploring the problematics evolved from Spike Lee's gender and sexual politics as well as the filmmaker's increasing importance as an authentic spokesman for African American communities.