Abstract:
African American historians have long struggled to make their history visible and bring black experience into the mainstream of American history. While African American scholarship has thrived, especially since the 1980s, African American history continues to be misrepresented in popular culture, especially film. This thesis examines the films of Spike Lee, a prolific and pioneering black filmmaker, who has striven to bridge the gap between advances made in professional historiography and regressive popular portrayals of African American history. I look at three of Lee’s key historical films which span his career: the controversial biopic Malcolm X (1992); the feature-length documentary 4 Little Girls (1997); and the World War Two film Miracle at St Anna (2008). This study carefully analyzes the interpretations presented in each of these three films, situating them within the wider historiography of each topic. It also considers how Lee constructs his historical narratives in the filmic medium and responds to past critiques published by reviewers and scholars. Such an analysis illustrates that Lee is a cinematic historian, a filmmaker whose work engages with existing arguments, and advances a thesis about the past. In particular, all three works challenge elements of the master narrative of the civil rights movement, one of the most important periods in recent African American history, and a period which continues to be consistently misrepresented by the media and in popular culture. Lee’s movies demonstrate that film is a medium capable of communicating legitimate and valid historical interpretations to a large audience.
