ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2 I look at Lee’s 2001 film Bamboozled. In my discussion in Chapter 2 I look more closely at how the signifier of minstrelsy is used, in this case by Lee, in vast and multiple ways to identify both the interrelatedness of black traumas and the dissociative process of adaptive disintegration of the black ego. Lee’s rendering of black satiric epistemology demonstrates the power of the spectacle of blackness, specifically the spectacle of minstrelsy, to not only determine the trajectory of black agency and black subject formation, but to actually predetermine the inevitable destruction of the black subject. As we look at the tableaux of racial madness that Lee’s film captures, we trace the historicity of minstrelsy as a process of black trauma, as well as of the larger effects of the social consumption of traumatic blackness.
