19 - Childhood, Melancholy, and Joy in Red Hook Summer

Spike Lee's Joints

A second reflection on Spike Lee's exploration of abandonment in Red Hook Summer, with particular focus on how the lives of the neighborhood revisit key themes of Black childhood and women's work. Children are more precarious in Red Hook Summer than in other Lee films, and women's work is no longer connected to a domestic sphere apart from the dramatics of outside, common space. Lee, I argue, offers us an appreciation of the vulnerability and exhaustion of women who've been tasked with the most difficult and dispiriting work - keeping children alive, witnessing their lives - and the precarity of Black childhood, while at the same time, as always, refusing to make that melancholy total. Instead, Lee entwines melancholy and joy in order to witness witnessing, in order to see and know the persistence of Black care even at the forefront of antiblack violence.