Epilogue

The Epilogue places Spike Lee’s Bamboozled into dialogue with the thought of Ralph Ellison, whose Invisible Man constitutes the silent source for Lee’s film. At the center of both works is the image of a falling body, which highlights the relationship between the present-past of slavery and the possibility of achieving a democratic future. Whereas Lee leaves viewers locked in the past of racial subjugation that his film’s treatment of blackface minstrelsy represents, Ellison revises Walt Whitman’s vision to underscore the ways nonprogressive temporal models can facilitate political progress. Limning the energies of progress and regress through the nonteleological trajectory he imbues in his novel’s key terms, “plunge” and “fall,” Ellison posits the definitive democratic movement. This idea remains recessed in the rhetoric of Barack Obama, who in his “speech on race” disavowed the politically transformative potential of the stasis associated with the racial worldview of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.