Arguably Spike Lee's best feature film, "Do The Right Thing" is a popular and celebrated example of African American's ongoing "new black film wave". Set during the hottest day of a racially tense year in New York City, the film's ensemble cast play out the edgy negotiations and dramas of a racially and culturally diverse working-class Brooklyn neighbourhood. "Do The Right Thing" depicts black urban life from a contemporary African American point of view. This book discusses how the film epitomises Spike Lee's powerful impact on the representation of race and difference in America, the progress of black film-making and the rise of multicultural voices in the media. The author emphasizes Lee's timely understanding of black film-making as a complex act, mixing the skills of the art, politics and business in order to fashion a creative practice that confonts institutional discrimination and power relations head on.

Author Biography

Ed Guerrero is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and Africana Studies at New York University. He has written extensively on black film-making and emergent cinemas for a number of journals, magazines and anthologies. He is the author of the influential study of black cinema, Framing Blackness (1993).