The representation of African American identity on screen for a Spanish audience: A multimodal approach to the dubbing of Luke Cage, Bamboozled, and Tropic Thunder

As Black History Months come around each year in the USA and UK, many cinemas, broadcasters, and streaming services now prioritise feature films, documentaries, series, and programmes that spotlight moments of Black history and explore the life experiences of Black people, both real and fictional. A great many of these have been made in recent years, as Black directors, scriptwriters, and actors have started to command the artistic freedoms for which they have spent many decades calling. Many of these productions are from the USA and focus on African American characters and stories in order to examine specific collective concerns, such as slavery (Emancipation; Fuqua 2022) and the intersections of race and class (Black-ish; Barris 2014–2022), and/or to commemorate significant figures and forms of cultural expression, as in the biographical drama Till (Chukwu 2022) and the documentary Summer of Soul (Thompson 2021). Such productions may be of interest to a general audience, as attested by the broad critical acclaim and substantial commercial success that many of them have enjoyed. Yet, they also perform a crucial role in reinforcing the ethnic identity and in-group identification of those who identify as African American. This can be for the simple fact that they prominently feature actors and characters of the same ethnicity, because of the connections that viewers establish with such characters on account of having had similar experiences and possessing similar values, and by offering positive role models that boost one’s concept of self (Behm-Morawitz 2020).