ABSTRACT
African American archaeology and Hollywood visions of African American experience are each rooted in a White imagination that has long contemplated itself by constructing Black identities. Cinematic Black subjectivity has offered a host of simplistic or racist misrepresentations including happy slaves in films like Gone with the Wind, the over sentimentalized White heroics in Amistad, or Jar-Jar Binks's overdone buffoonery. Archaeology of life along the colour line should produce a complicated picture of American experience that is not simply reduced to Black exoticism and an undefined White normality. Lee's black-face racial masquerade is a precarious satirical venture that uses racialist symbols to critique those very symbols and the social assumptions that reproduce them along the colour line. Micheaux's vindicationist cinema never became common in Hollywood's representations of Black identity, but many contemporary filmmakers have aspired to tell uplifting stories about African American experience that comfort White audiences even as they appear to probe the complications of Black life.
