Watching Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (DTRT) in South Africa today is a curiously nostalgic experience. The fashion (Jordans sneakers and high top fade haircuts), the music (Public Enemy and Rosie Perez), and a sense of black pride through pop culture – these kinds of representations of blackness were common in the 90s on television, including in South Africa. The nostalgia of these images is linked to a memory of a time when our troubled country was entering its democratic transition. Mandela was freed, the ANC was unbanned. South African kwaito music exploded and 90s hip hop was a staple on the radio. However, in 1989, at the time of the film’s release, South Africa was still subject to a global cultural boycott, which Lee as an artist strongly adhered to. This essay will examine the experience of watching Do the Right Thing in South Africa, with a particular focus on its first public screening in the country at The Weekly Mail Film Festival, two years after the global release of DTRT. I interviewed the director of the Weekly Mail Film Festival, Liza Key, to recall the acquisition of the film in the context of South Africa’s cultural boycott, and the role Nelson Mandela played in screening the film in South Africa. Do The Right Thing’s main strength is its authentic and complex depiction of black life in America. But perhaps more powerful than this was its ability to highlight simmering racial prejudice and structural racism, which had (and still has) fatal consequences for black people. In his master’s dissertation at The University of The Witwatersrand (which was also the site of the first DTRT screening in South Africa), Jeffrey Mathethe Sehume writes critically that the film does not adequately detail the structures that oppress black people, but that Lee has to be “applauded” for his “attempt to chronicle the Black condition.” The film cemented Lee as an auteur, but more importantly, it gave voice to a universal black experience. In South Africa, we are no strangers to state violence and police brutality. Apartheid is only 25 years in the past, and in a post-apartheid South Africa, police shot and killed 34 striking platinum mine workers in the 2012 Marikana Massacre. At a commemoration for the tragedy that I attended in 2015, a white unionist from the UK addressed the large crowd and spontaneously chanted “Black Lives Matter!” The crowd joined in. The unionist was making a deliberate connection to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and the struggles faced by the South

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斯派克·李（Spike Lee），《做正确的事》和南非种族隔离的文化抵制

今天在南非观看Spike Lee的《做正确的事（DTRT）》是一种令人怀念的怀旧经历。时尚（乔丹运动鞋和高顶浅色发型），音乐（公共敌人和罗西·佩雷斯）以及通过流行文化带来的黑色自豪感–这些黑色代表在90年代的电视上很常见，包括南非。这些图像的怀旧与对我们这个陷入困境的国家进入民主过渡时期的记忆有关。曼德拉获释，非国大不受限制。南非的科威特音乐爆炸了，90年代的嘻哈音乐成为广播中的主要内容。但是，在1989年（影片发行之时），南非仍然受到全球文化抵制的打击，而作为艺术家的李坚决坚持这一抵制。本文将探讨在南非观看“做正确的事”的经历，特别是在DTRT全球发行两年后，它在该国的每周邮件电影节上首次在该国进行公共放映。我采访了每周邮件电影节的导演丽莎·基（Liza Key），回顾了在南非文化抵制的背景下对这部电影的收购以及纳尔逊·曼德拉（Nelson Mandela）在放映南非电影中所扮演的角色。做正确的事的主要力量是它对美国黑人生活的真实而复杂的描绘。但是，也许比这更强大的功能是它能够彰显出缓慢的种族偏见和结构性种族主义，而种族歧视和结构性种族主义已经（并且仍然给黑人带来了致命的后果）。在威特沃特斯兰德大学（也是南非首次进行DTRT放映的地点）的硕士学位论文中，杰弗里·马修·塞休姆（Jeffrey Mathethe Sehume）批判性地写道，这部电影没有足够详细地描述压迫黑人的结构，但李因其“试图记述黑人状况而必须受到称赞”。这部电影使李成为了一名导演，但更重要的是，它给了普遍的黑人体验以声音。在南非，我们对国家暴力和警察暴行并不陌生。种族隔离仅仅过去25年，在种族隔离之后的南非，警察在2012年的马里卡纳大屠杀中枪杀了34名打击白金矿的工人。在纪念我2015年参加的悲剧时，一位来自英国的白人工会主义者向大批民众讲话，并自发地高呼“黑人生命至关重要！” 人群加入了。