The D Is Silent: Django Unchained and the African American West

Abstract

Although director Quentin Tarantino has described Django Unchained as belonging to a “new, virgin-snow kind of genre,” the African American western is not new at all. Following Tarantino’s lead (his claim of striking out into virgin territory with Django), reviews of the film suggest a too ready willingness to attribute to a white screenwriter and director a generic innovation that African American writers and filmmakers have been creatively inventing and reinventing for centuries. As a post-spaghetti western, Django Unchained also extends and revises (but does not invent) a signal trope of the spaghetti western, the casting of African American actors—from Woody Strode to Jim Brown to Fred Williamson—in films with western plots. My presentation looks at Django Unchained not as something new but as an interesting variation on something old—the African American western—examining Tarantino’s contribution to a genre that has long been in existence. Only against the backdrop of that representational history can we fairly judge what Tarantino’s film does and does not accomplish.