“Revenge is never a straight Line:” Whitewashing Blackness, Blaxploitation and the Development of White Imagery in Tarantino’s Django Unchained

Year 2024, Volume: 34 Issue: 2, 505 - 520, 24.12.2024

Beatrice Melodia Festa

https://doi.org/10.26650/LITERA2024-1478090

Abstract

Despite its release dates back to 2012, Tarantino’s Django Unchained remains one of the most visual and memorable cinematic representations of slavery in American cinema. The film’s release inaugurated a long narrative cycle in Hollywood of bold portrayals of slavery on the big screen. However, Tarantino’s revisionist depiction of chattel slavery has generated a debate that is still open about the trouble for a white filmmaker to “revise” one of the darkest pages of American history infusing it with outlandish humor. The essay undertakes an analysis of how, beneath Django Unchained’s apparent depiction of black empowerment, Tarantino constructs an interplay between slave heroism and revenge, developing a form of “blaxploitation” through “white” revenge fantasies. In so doing, Tarantino creates a cinematic circularity that departs from the Spaghetti Western genre, develops the image of a black hero, ultimately creating a cinematic circularity that culminates in an aesthetic representation of vengeance that reclaims the memory of slavery and uses African American cultural history as a cinematic tool to offer a white perspective on chattel slavery. As such, the ultimate aim of this contribution is to shed light on how Tarantino’s whitewashes slave rebellion.

Keywords

Tarantino, Django Unchained, blaxploitation, race, revenge

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