“You Talkin’ To Me?” Mediating Postmodern Blackface in La Haine

Abstract

Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film La Haine (Hate) is recognized as a key component of the cinéma des banlieues genre that arose during the late 1980s in France. By addressing the representational logic of the film's critique of economic and racial tensions in the marginalized cités ringing Paris, this essay tracks how it mediates the construction of postmodern identity. In particular, this analysis positions La Haine as a text that appropriates what I call “postmodern Blackface” as a tropological application of identity that explores the liminality of Whiteness and the performance of postassimilatory difference. Reading Kassovitz's role in relation to his main character, Vinz, encourages close reading of the film as a rich text for cultural critique. This essay first articulates postmodern Blackface as a mediating response to assimilation and Whiteness before considering how La Haine contributes to the evolving rhetorical and cultural interrogation of postassimilatory identity.