SPIKE LEE REWRITES HISTORY IN C.S.A.: THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA
C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, directed by Kevin Willmott, is a mokumentary, that is, a film in the format of a documentary but about untrue events. What if the South won the Civil War? That is the premise of the film, which is based in part on two actual facts that appear as titles at the end. One is that the CSA Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin, a Jewish lawyer and former plantation owner, went to Europe in order to negotiate an alliance with England or France, though both countries demurred, presumably awaiting a substantial Southern victory before they would act favorably. (Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, announced in 1862, ended any possible association of Britain with the Southern cause, as England had abolished slavery in 1833 due to a vigorous antislavery movement.) The second fact is that the CSA envisioned an empire that would take control of the entire hemisphere south of the Río Grande. The mokumentary features the victory of the South with the aid of British and French troops, extension of slavery to the North, a reconstruction era that taxed Northerners heavily, escape of slaves and abolitionists to Canada, reservations for Native Americans, Jews allowed to live on a Long Island reservation, enslavement of Chinese transcontinental railroad workers, export of Black slaves to Africa to bail the country out of the Great Depression, an alliance with Nazi Germany, a Cold War with Canada, and a return to “normality” in the 1980s. The mokumentary is presented as a product of a British Broadcasting Service, with commercials that presume the continuation of slavery. Some of the commercial products, such as Darkie Toothpaste, were in actual use up to the 1980s in parts of Asia, but titles at the end point out that Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben continue to evoke the slave status of African Americans. Although the mokumentary is satirical and is intended to evoke laughter, there is a deadly serious element throughout. A credit at the end discloses that Spike Lee is the film’s producer. MH