IU Press Journals - Transition 112: The Django Issue

Transition was founded in 1961 in Uganda by the late Rajat Neogy and quickly established itself as a leading forum for intellectual debate. The first series of issues developed a reputation for tough-minded, far-reaching criticism, both cultural and political, and this series carries on the tradition.

AN INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Houston A. Baker, Jr.

Django UnpackedTransition examines Quentin Tarantinos latest tour de force.

Pop aesthetics and fantasy frame Djangos violent, lawless world. Transition Editor and cultural critic, Glenda Carpio, examines what it means to make light of the most pernicious period in American history.

Outrage and alienation converge in the figures of Christopher Dorner and Django. Historian Walter Johnson considers how both outlaw-heroes erase the pastand leap into a dystopian present.

Film critic Chris Vognar explores the Tarantino shock triumviraterace, violence, and comedyand decides yes, he can.

Entertainment and history are uneasy companions, and the discourse that surrounded Django Unchained debated much of this dilemma; how can film useand not abusehistory? Film scholar Terri Francis probes the question.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. talks with Quentin Tarantino about filming slavery, a Django trilogy, the N-word, and white saviors vs. sidekicks.

In Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot points to the question of accuracy vs. authenticity in the historical narrative. Yarimar Bonilla takes up Trouillots distinction to grapple with the films Django Unchained and Lincoln.

Tony Kushner speaks with Daniel Itzkovitz on Lincoln, why he didnt make a movie about slavery, and his own upbringing in the 1960s segregated-to-integrated South.

There are heroes that history remembers and records, and there are others that pass through the gates of time quietly and without much fuss. Xolela Mangcu asks us to re-examine the public narrative that surrounds political historyand esteem South Africas unsung heroes.

Nicholas T. Rinehart debunks theories of Beethovens blackness and calls for a reimagining of the classical canon.

Anthropologists Mark Schuller and Deborah A. Thomas discuss structural violence, social justice, human rights, and their collaborative filmmaking projects in the Caribbean. A conversation on the making of Poto Mitan and Bad Friday.

Cover: Django. 2013 Mary Solyanick.

Cover of My Negro Novella. Graphite and pastel on paper. 88 72 in. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. 2010 Kara Walker.

fantasys role in Django Unchained

QUENTIN TARANTINO

DJANGO UNCHAINED IS not supposed to be experienced or understood as a historically accurate representation of slavery; surprisingly, this point has been lost on many a viewer. It is, as the film critic Chris Vognar rightly notes, a typical Tarantino movie, which is to say that it is more concerned about movies than anything else. At the same time, the film is deeply situated in both the history of cinema and historical fantasy. Tarantino has a little fun telling the story of a slave named Django, a reference to the titular hero of Sergio Corbuccis 1966 spaghetti Western, himself named after the virtuoso jazz musician Django Reinhardt. Tarantino also makes multiple visual and narrative allusions to the blaxploitation tour de force, the 1975 film Mandingo, and other films in this genreThe Legend of Nigger Charley (1972) and its sequels, The Soul of Nigger Charley (1973) and Boss Nigger (1975), as well as direct and oblique references to Norse mythology, to D.W. Griffiths The Birth of a Nation (1915) and the novel that inspired it (Thomas Dixons 1905 The Clansman), to the slave narrative genre, and a host of other cultural artifacts. But Django Unchained also jolts viewers with scenes of chattel slavery that are so violently horrific that watching without squirming is impossible, as when a slave is torn apart by dogs or when two slaves are made to fight each other to death with bare hands. The combination of Tarantino having a little fun and his subject matter, arguably the mostly explosive and, especially from a contemporary perspective, most earnestly treated topic in American history, risks trivialization. Yet Django Unchained is also a richly allusive cultural text that, through its intertextuality and its arguably excessive use of violence, makes vivid the brutality of American chattel slavery.

Tarantinos willingness to treat a national wound with pop aesthetics is startling, but it also suggests why popular culture has the potential to get at topics that more highbrow forms can miss. In avoiding the solemnity of polite and earnest forms of expression, as in Amistad or Schindlers List, for instance, films like Django Unchained