Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Kent Symposiums II: City and Literature, İstanbul, Türkiye, 18 Nisan 2026, ss.22, (Özet Bildiri)
Spike
Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) reveals the American city as a contested
battlefield where sound and space converge to expose racial power structures.
Set on the hottest day in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, the film transforms a
single block into what Henri Lefebvre calls a crisis of “spatial production”; where
competing claims to ownership, representation, and presence collide violently.
This
paper examines how the film deploys sonic politics as spatial practice. Radio
Raheem’s boombox, broadcasting Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” functions as
what Steve Goodman terms “sonic warfare”, an acoustic assertion of Black
presence in public space. When Sal destroys the boombox and police kill Radio
Raheem, the film exposes how state violence enforces racialized spatial
hierarchies. The subsequent riot becomes not chaos but spatial reclamation: a
violent assertion of the "right to the city."
Drawing
on Lefebvre’s spatial theory, Michel de Certeau’s concepts of tactics and
strategies, and Critical Race Theory's analysis of urban space, I argue that Do
the Right Thing demonstrates how American cities are structured through
racial exclusion. The Wall of Fame debate literalizes representational politics;
whose culture is legitimized in Black neighborhoods? The film’s Brechtian
formal techniques, vibrant color palette, and ensemble structure create a
cinematic geography that maps power relations spatially, revealing cinema’s
capacity to theorize urban justice through form itself.