Slave Historiography in Quentin Tarantino’s Movie Django Unchained

Abstract

Quentin Tarantino’s Movie Django Unchained (2012) starring Jamie Foxx tells the story of an eponymous hero with an attitude, seeking revenge and stopping at nothing to free the love of his life. Sticking to his true Tarantino style, Django has blood and gore here, there and everywhere. Although Django talks about slavery in a way that really stuns audiences, it also glorifies the violence through a spaghetti western genre, depicting slavery and race through the lens of violence. Adopting the second style of slave representation, the African American star seeks revenge for the way he has been mistreated, and seeks liberty for him and his wife. Also the character Dr King Schultz, played by Christopher Waltz, incorporates the third style of white guilt, as Schultz treats Django like a human being and ultimately ends up dying in his favour. What makes this movie a pioneer is not in depicting slavery and the sufferings brought forth by it in bare and realistic manner but in blending the reality with the genre of action-adventure at some expense of accuracy and opening a new door to view the history of slavery by creating an unprecedented Black hero capable of fighting back for his and his fellow slaves’ freedom and acting as a beacon of hope towards destabilizing the institution of slavery at the verge of civil war in antebellum America.