ABSTRACT
The 1980s was a complicated period for the marketing of Afro-American culture. As Ed Guerrero notes, the decade began with a trend of effacing and repressing Afro-American culture. School Daze and Do the Right Thing, however, both intervene in that process; the films offer different but related approaches to confront the inconspicuous operations of the language of the dominant. In the case of School Daze, this approach can be characterized as appropriation and intervention; with Do the Right Thing, as subversion and transformation. At several important junctions, however, the film foregrounds its appropriation of classical style and exposes the structural operations at stake there. The film's opening introduces this rhetorical practice. The potential and realized complications of misreading are thus fundamental for School Dazes ability to function as critique of the politics of representation as they relate to racism.
