26 - BlacKkKlansman as Retrospective and Militant Memory

A reckoning with Spike Lee's 2018 film BlacKkKlansman as a retrospective on his previous films on race, racism, and U.S. history, as well as his treatment of memory of atrocity as the basis for real militancy. Lee revisits his ontology of antiblack racism, embedding it in political institutions and social-cultural practices, here linking those institutions and practices to the history of lynching, policing, and the alt-right riots in Charlottesville, Virginia. That series of links ends with an evocation of militancy: we have to confront the past, present, and future with both vigilance and the capacity for violence against the present, in the name of and toward a different - forever in the interrogative for Lee - kind of future.