Django Unchained Research Articles

Introduction

Introduction:Django Unchained—Disrupting Classical Hollywood Historical Realism? Joi Carr (bio) Big Daddy: Django isn’t a slave. Django is a free man. You understand? You can’t treat him like any of the other N—s around here because he ain’t like any of the other N—s around here. You got that? Betina: You want I should treat him like white folks? Big Daddy: No. That’s not what I said. Betina: Then I don’t know what you want, Big Daddy. Big Daddy: Yes, I can see that. —Django Unchained A man who possesses a language possesses an indirect consequence of the world expressed and implied by this language. You can see what we are driving at: there is an extraordinary power in the possession of language. —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. King Shultz’s (Christoph Waltz) arrival on their first plantation together is a telling moment in the film’s fictive world. They cloak their status as bounty hunters under the guise of a business proposition. Big Daddy (Don Johnson) dismisses Betina to show Django around the plantation while he discusses business matters with Shultz. However, before they leave, Shultz requests that Django be treated as “an extension” of himself, since he is free. “You want I should treat him like white folks?”1 Betina (Miriam F. Grover) asks Big Daddy in befuddlement. Her question is central to Django’s identity as a free man. Big Daddy does not quite know how to answer Betina’s question. He has a hard time thinking beyond his white privilege to search his mind for an example that he might provide parameters to follow that does not violate his colonial mind-set. He finally suggests that she treats Django the same way she treats that little “pecker” boy in town, “Well that’s it then. You just treat him like you would [End Page 37] Jerry.” With this directive in mind, Betina escorts Django around the property. Big Daddy’s conundrum sets the stage for Django Unchained (2012): How does one treat a free black male body in a white supremacist environment (Fig. 1)? Consider the following scenario to situate the framing for this Close-Up. When filmmakers create a film steeped in history, they do so knowing that negotiating spectators’ complex attitudes related to particular events and time periods can be a daunting task. Yet, Oscar award-winning writer and director, Quentin Tarantino seems to have welcomed the challenge and strategically approached Django. He considered carefully his choice to use elements of historical realism while simultaneously subverting that reality with fantasy elements from the western genre for a greater purpose: one that involves critiquing black masculinity and classical Hollywood black cinematic stereotypes.2 Tarantino’s success in this endeavor is up for close scrutiny. Tarantino’s aggressive and deft hand with the cinematic apparatus posits a clear point of view (Fig. 2). A master class in operationalizing cinematic language, the film lends credibility to the power of cinematic language and its evocative nature. It also demonstrates that the cinematic gaze is deeply tethered to the acculturation of the filmmaker, rendering the story subject to her/ his imaginative volition. Frantz Fanon explains in the epigraph above, “A man who possesses a language possesses an indirect consequence of the world expressed and implied by this language. You can see what we are driving at: there is an extraordinary power in the possession of language.”3 I would argue Tarantino’s project is to challenge the pernicious imagery of black inferiority. His genre-bending choices are stunning, scandalous even, and creates a paradigm shift for slave narratives. Tarantino does not take the easy route to explore his story. Meaning, a film that functions in ordinary fictional realism invites a viewer into its world and creates its own reality (and rules). As such, viewers are more willing to suspend disbelief and explore the narrative in a new or different way. However, creating a film that engages with historical realism is much more complicated and risky because it invites and constitutes a revisionist history. Tarantino states, “I wasn...

Django Unchained: A Black-Centered Superhero and Unchained Audiences

Critical discussion of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) centers around two related sets of questions. The first set concerns the representation of blackness on the screen and the gaze as racialized. The second set has been centered on questions of historical accuracy and the political implications of a historical cinema that thematizes slavery. This article argues, developing the insights of others such as Litheko Modisane, Tsitsi Jaji, and Manthia Diawara, that audiences are not enchained by a director’s vision, but are creative and resistant in their responses to film. For this reason it is possible to theorize Jamie Foxx’s Django as a black-centered superhero, if a certain audience is convened for the screening. This audience-centered response liberates viewers, in the United States and elsewhere, from the limitations imposed by a director’s vision and enables discussions of black-centered identities.

Breaking the Chains of Science: The Rhetoric of Empirical Racism in Django Unchained

This commentary surveys the skull scene in Django Unchained. Plantation owner Calvin Candie’s appeal to the racist science of phrenology is one example of how a number of scholarly discourses have been used to justify discrimination. I maintain that, while Candie’s monologue evokes the rhetoric of scientific racism, Django’s and Stephen’s respective interactions with Candie, as “Field Negro” and “House Negro,” undermine the enslaver’s notions of white supremacy. Contemporary society must likewise consider and critique the cultural tropes, institutional narratives, and academic or popular texts that attempt to sideline Black ways of knowing and being.

Is Quentin Tarantino Calvin Candie?: The Essence of Exploitation in Django Unchained

This essay argues that Quentin Tarantino’s use of African American cultural history as a cinematic tool is similar in exploitation to the actions of his own slave-owning villain Calvin Candie in Django Unchained. Through the close examination of two key scenes, it will be shown that Tarantino’s stylistic use of slavery and African American characters is deeply problematic in its white savior arrogance to revise black cultural history through the cultural production of a film. Tarantino’s postmodern pastiche exploits signifiers from many areas of popular culture for entertainment, but it is his use of slavery, hip-hop, and representations of black masculinity as tools for audience manipulation that are particularly troubling. Tarantino’s cultural appropriation is an inherently derogatory creative choice that warrants examination by film scholars.

Supremasi Kulit Putih di Balik Kemenangan Orang Kulit Hitam dalam Film Django Unchained (2012): Sebuah Kritik terhadap Ideologi Post-Racial di Amerika

<p>The writing examines how the process of maintaining the ideology of white supremacy and how Django’s character is constructed as a subject in planting white ideology in the movie Django Unchained (2012) based on the analysis of Django’s relationship with other characters. The appearance of the movie during the state of post-racial society in America can be seen as a form of criticism of the ideology, and the movie will be analyzed to deconstruct it. The approaches used in this thesis are Stuart Hall’s interpretation of Gramci’s hegemony in the context of racial. This study aims to look at the process of hegemony to maintain white supremacy and clarify the status of the controller and the controlled. Moreover, analysis of the characters’ relationship becomes important because Django’s relationship with the other white characters represent minority and majority group relations. With the results of this study, the movie Django Unchained is a medium to build and maintain the hegemony of white supremacy.</p>

The Subject Effaced

Quentin Tarantino’s stated ambition for Django Unchained was to create a film that grapples with “America’s horrible past with slavery . . . but do them like spaghetti westerns.” This article considers the implications of those priorities—a serious treatment of slavery on one hand, and reference to genre tropes on the other. It concludes that, although the spaghetti Western may be particularly well suited to depict the nihilistic and dehumanizing violence that undoubtedly characterized chattel slavery, the genre’s resistance to the representation of human subjectivity mirrors the relative silence around the psychological dimension, not only of slavery, but also of continuing crisis of structural racism in the post–civil rights era. As such, through the specific narrative and aesthetic strategies he employs, Tarantino unwittingly undermines his own pretensions to social consciousness, producing instead a film that reflects and reproduces the ignorance, strategic silence, and White guilt surrounding America’s ongoing history of slavery and racism.

Film's Political Economy and <em>Django Unchained</em>

Never before has a film earned blockbuster status while presenting a formerly enslaved African as a heroic lead, as in Django Unchained . Using a political economy analysis, this commentary addresses Django Unchained ’s complex counterhegemonic media representations and production and distribution system. For the first time, box office revenues indicate the global market appeal of a defiant Black hero with appropriate production and distribution budgets and strategies. Django Unchained ’s 425 percent return on a $100 million investment suggests that audiences are ready to explore high-quality counterhegemonic narratives that challenge conventional media representations of cultural minorities. Such staggering popularity warrants a historical reception study of this film and its context; for analyzing media industries’ texts within their political economy calls attention to the fact that the production, distribution, and reception of culture take place within a specific economic and political system, constituted by relations between the state, the economy, social institutions and practices, culture, and the media.

Breaking the Chains of Science: The Rhetoric of Empirical Racism in <em>Django Unchained</em>

This commentary surveys the skull scene in Django Unchained. Plantation owner Calvin Candie’s appeal to the racist science of phrenology is one example of how a number of scholarly discourses have been used to justify discrimination. I maintain that, while Candie’s monologue evokes the rhetoric of scientific racism, Django’s and Stephen’s respective interactions with Candie, as “Field Negro” and “House Negro,” undermine the enslaver’s notions of white supremacy. Contemporary society must likewise consider and critique the cultural tropes, institutional narratives, and academic or popular texts that attempt to sideline Black ways of knowing and being.

The Plantation is Burning: Queer Melancholies, Violent Intimacies, and Plantation Camp in <em>Django Unchained</em>

This essay works through contemporary articulations of queer melancholy over the ungrieved (white) loss of (black) labor in Quentin Tarantino's 2012 film Django Unchained. Using scholars such as Butler, Sedgwick, and Babuscio, the author posits that Tarantino's aesthetic traffics in a "queer camp" that purposefully engages a cultural/historical model of plantation structure to enact a personal revenge for the film's hero that, ultimately—and naively—invites the audience to imagine a post-racial American fantasy. Reading the last image of the film, the slow-burning of the plantation of Candyland, the author asks questions about what such a final image suggests for both Tarantino's audience and his characters, including, "Who owns intimacy? Who owns revenge? And where does an intimacy of voyeurism work in an erotics of violence? What is the color of American justice, and how does it value change depending on region?" The essay ends with a call to reframe the burning plantation imaginary into a site where those marginalized by a politics/erotics of the plantation South write/talk back against their peripheralization and remake the image into a space of revolution and radicalization.

Is Quentin Tarantino Calvin Candie?: The Essence of Exploitation in <em>Django Unchained</em>

This essay argues that Quentin Tarantino’s use of African American cultural history as a cinematic tool is similar in exploitation to the actions of his own slave-owning villain Calvin Candie in Django Unchained . Through the close examination of two key scenes, it will be shown that Tarantino’s stylistic use of slavery and African American characters is deeply problematic in its white savior arrogance to revise black cultural history through the cultural production of a film. Tarantino’s postmodern pastiche exploits signifiers from many areas of popular culture for entertainment, but it is his use of slavery, hip-hop, and representations of black masculinity as tools for audience manipulation that are particularly troubling. Tarantino’s cultural appropriation is an inherently derogatory creative choice that warrants examination by film scholars.

<em>Django Unchained:</em> A Black-Centered Superhero and Unchained Audiences

Critical discussion of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) centers around two related sets of questions. The first set concerns the representation of blackness on the screen and the gaze as racialized. The second set has been centered on questions of historical accuracy and the political implications of a historical cinema that thematizes slavery. This article argues, developing the insights of others such as Litheko Modisane, Tsitsi Jaji, and Manthia Diawara, that audiences are not enchained by a director’s vision, but are creative and resistant in their responses to film. For this reason it is possible to theorize Jamie Foxx’s Django as a black-centered superhero, if a certain audience is convened for the screening. This audience-centered response liberates viewers, in the United States and elsewhere, from the limitations imposed by a director’s vision and enables discussions of black-centered identities.

Da Gordon a Django. Figurazioni dell'eroismo e memoria della schiavitù negli Stati Uniti

Even before its release in 2012 Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained was the object of hot transatlantic discussions, mostly criticizing the film as one more item to add to the long list of “white savior narratives” produced by Hollywood and questioning the right of white authors to appropriate black stories. Indeed, unlike the Caribbean and other former slave countries, where the public memorialization of the abolition of slavery and the slave trade has recently shifted its focus from benevolent white heroes to black freedom fighters, the US still finds black heroism and the representation of the agency of the enslaved problematic. While challenging the interpretation of Tarantino’s film as a white savior narrative, this essay deals with the US failure to represent black rebels fighting for emancipation in the public space. It also explores African American visual and literary counternarratives of black heroism, finally asking whether Jamie Foxx’s Django, though an individualistic hero who lacks racial awareness, responds to contemporary young blacks’ distrust in progressive narratives of the US race question.

The Settler Unchained

This article argues that the phrase “monopoly of violence,” which circulates in so many contemporary academic critiques of the liberal state, is not adequate to describe the nature of violence deployed by settler colonial societies against indigenous and racialized bodies. Settler colonialism depends on a mode of popular sovereignty that serves primarily as a diffusion of the necropolitical power of the colonizing polity rather than as a check on the tyranny of the state. Through a consideration of an assemblage of unlikely contemporary objects—Glenn Beck's 2013 keynote address to the National Rifle Association, Antonio Negri's monograph Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, and Quentin Tarantino's film Django Unchained—it explores how European and Euro-American imaginings of constituent power can serve to reinforce settler colonial political traditions rather than offer an alternative.

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

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.

Response: “Why Slavery Now?” Django Unchained as a History of the Present

This response considers Django Unchained in light of Quentin Tarantino’s comments about the relationship between films on slavery and national “healing.” The essay draws upon the roundtable discussion on Django Unchained, to address the contemporary relevance of Tarantino’s historical retelling.

Response: “Goodbye Miss Lara!” or what’s Slavery got to do with it? Regeneration through Violence in Django Unchained?

There is a moment in Django Unchained where the film abruptly shifts from a recognizable Western into a different register, one neither incompatible nor unfamiliar. Masquerading as a free black val...

“Dollar in the Teeth”: Upsetting the Post-Western after Leone or Worlding the Western

This article aims to show the complex cultural and political intertextualities that feed into Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” as a post-Western through examining its relationships with Jamaican reggae and film, Blaxploitation, and the many traditions of the US Western in popular culture.

Response: Intertextuality, Politics, and the Present Tense in Django Unchained

When Django Unchained was released in December 2012, it was met with broad—and sometimes pointed—criticism: From the right, came moralistic disapproval of its violence, from the left, concerns of r...

Django Unchained: Repurposing Western Film Music

The film music used in Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film, Django Unchained signals a deliberate engagement with the aesthetics and politics of the Vietnam and Watergate era and the malignant effects of the era’s malaise on black cinema. The upward trajectory of Tarantino’s Django, a wholesome, self-confident, Southern Black Power hero, repudiates the discontent and despair depicted in films made between 1966 and 1974 and offers an optimistic (if anachronistic) counter-narrative to the grim political landscape of the era’s cinema and to the demise of the Blaxploitation genre. Tarantino’s repurposing of film music from the spaghetti western genre specifically is essential to his project of turning his neo-Blaxploitation hero into “the fastest gun in the South.”

“And I would call it ‘A Southern’”: Renewing/Obscuring the Blaxploitation Western

Django Unchained has been both hailed and criticized by audiences for its treatment of race and slavery. Much of the public debate has focused on the somewhat superficial level of language use, particularly the excessive use of the “n-word” in the film. There are, however, deeper issues for ideological concern in Tarantino’s seemingly apolitical movie. By showing how Tarantino builds on a number of features of the Blaxploitation formula and recreates scenes from particular films while simultaneously obscuring these films’ contributions to his own work and style, this article argues that the directory engages in a new kind of Blaxploitation on the extratextual level by borrowing from, without giving credit to, an African American film tradition in the interest of over-emphasizing his own film’s originality in supposedly creating a new less racially exclusive genre. At the same time, on a textual level Tarantino’s “cool cynicism” (bell hooks) empties the radical political energy that was inherent at least in early Blaxploitation films.