Table of Contents

The Spike Lee Reader Table of Contents Acknowledgements We've Gotta Have It: Spike Lee, African American Film, and Cinema Studies Paula J. Massood Chapter 1'Whose Pussy is This': A Feminist Comment bell hooks Chapter 2 Programming with School Daze Toni Cade Bambara Chapter 3 Spike Lee and Black Women Michele Wallace Chapter 4 But Compared to What?: Reading Realism, Representation, and Essentialism in School Daze, Do the Right Thing, and the Spike Lee Discourse Wahneema Lubiano Chapter 5 The Double Truth, Ruth: Do the Right Thing and the Culture of Ambiguity James C. McKelly Chapter 6 Spike Lee and the Fever in the Racial Jungle Ed Guerrero Chapter 7'Spike, Don't Mess Malcolm Up': Courting Controversy and Control in Malcolm X-The Movie Anna Everett Chapter 8 Through the Looking Glass and Over the Rainbow: Exploring the Fairy Tale in Spike Lee's Crooklyn Mark D. Cunningham Chapter 9 Clockers (Spike Lee 1995): Adaptation in Black Keith M. Harris Chapter 10 Reel Men: Get on the Bus and the Shifting Terrain of Black Masculinities S. Craig Watkins Chapter 11 We Shall Overcome: Preserving History and Memory in 4 Little Girls Christine Acham Chapter 12 Spike Lee Meets Aaron Copeland Krin Gabbard Chapter 13 Race and Black American Film Noir: Summer of Sam as Lynching Parable Dan Flory Chapter 14 Racial Kitsch and Black Performance Tavia Nyong'o Chapter 15 I Be Smackin' My Hoes': Paradox and Authenticity in Bamboozled Beretta Smith-Shomade Chapter 16 De Profundis: A Love letter from the Inside Man David Gerstner Notes on Contributors Select Bibliography Filmography (including exec. prod. credits and television segments) Index

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Looking at the films of the prolific, often controversial, and always provocative director

About the Author

Paula J. Massood is Associate Professor of Film Studies, Department of Film, Brooklyn College, CUNY, and author of Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Temple).

Reviews

"No filmmaker touches the nerves of Americans, black and white alike, as Spike Lee does. Throughout his career, he has been a necessary provocateur in our national conversation about race. These essays provide comprehensive analysis of his films and articulate why he is such a potent force in our cultural landscape."-Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University "While there have been various articles, chapters in books and books about individual films from Lee, there has not been a collection of scholarly essays examining a broad range of his films until now. In The Spike Lee Reader, Paula Massood has gathered a strong collection of essays." Black Camera "The Spike Lee Reader includes new and several well-known pieces previously published about Lee's work. The previously published pieces work seamlessly with the newer additions. These pieces provide a foundation to remind readers of the discourse established in response to the first decade of his career concerning representations of gender, sexuality, and class... The Spike Lee Reader is a necessary addition to the library of researchers and scholars in film and cultural studies. It is also a theoretically rich, interdisciplinary text that will be of use for upper division undergraduate and graduate courses on film, popular culture, and Ethnic Studies." - American Studies