ABSTRACT
A single problem, moving in several directions at the same time, guides this essay.1 I seek to understand Hollywood’s cinema of racial violence, a cinema represented in more than twenty films released between 1987 and 1998. Produced by mainstream Anglo, African American, and Latino/a filmmakers, this cinema located racial violence in the black and brown public sphere, the hyperghetto, America’s postindustrial wasteland.2 Spike Lee is right. At one level, America’s war on race occurred in the spaces and the battlegrounds created by these films. It was and remains a war fought on the battlefields of cultural representation.
