La violence raciale à la croisée de l’Ouest et du Sud dans Rosewood (John Singleton, 1997)

Abstract

Almost twenty years before Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, African American film director John Singleton’s Rosewood (1997) told the violent racial history of the South during the Jim Crow era and the real suffering they experienced at the hands of Whites, via a combination of a western-style narrative with a black cowboy hero and a historical drama. This article explores the interplay between South and West and examines how Rosewood borrows from the Western genre to explore and rewrite racial history in the American South. The director makes use of generic hybridity to show the persistence of a “racial Frontier” on screen. The filmmaker modified the known accounts of the 1923 Rosewood massacre to include a Western-style resolution to historical conflicts.