Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained The Continuation of Metacinema

Django Unchained is certainly Quentin Tarantino's most commercially-successful film and is arguably also his most controversial. Fellow director Spike Lee has denounced the representation of race and slavery in the film, while many African American writers have defended the white auteur. The use of extremely graphic violence in the film, even by Tarantino's standards, at a time when gun control is being hotly debated, has sparked further controversy and has led to angry outbursts by the director himself. Moreover, Django Unchained has become a popular culture phenomenon, with t-shirts, highly contentious action figures, posters, and strong DVD/BluRay sales. The topic (slavery and revenge), the setting (a few years before the Civil War), the intentionally provocative generic roots (Spaghetti Western and Blaxploitation) and the many intertexts and references (to German and French culture) demand a thorough examination. Befitting such a complex film, the essays collected here represent a diverse group of scholars who examine Django Unchained from many perspectives.

Oliver C. Speck is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, US. His scholarly writing focuses on the representation of memory and history in French, German and other European cinema.

Introduction: A Southern State of Exception - Oliver C. Speck (VCU, US)
Part I. Cultural Roots: Germany and France
1) "Dr. 'King' Schultz as Ideologue and Emblem: The German Enlightenment and the Legacy of the 1848 Revolutions in Django Unchained" - Robert von Dassanowsky (U of Colorado, Colorado Springs, US)
2) Franco-faux-ne : Django's jive - Margaret Ozierski (VCU, US)
Part II. Intertextual Links: Wagner, Niebelungen, Lincoln
3) "Tarantino Unchained, Or a Perfect Wagnerite?" - Michael Burri (University of Pennsylvania, US)
4) Of Hand-Shakes and Dragons: Django's German Cousins - Dana Weber (Florida State University, US)
5) The Complementary Django and Lincoln - Gregory L. Kaster (Gustavus Adolphus College, US)
Part III. Philosophy Unchained: Ethics, Body Space and Evil
6) Bodies in and out of Place: Tarantino's Django Unchained and Body-Spaces - Alexander D. Ornella (University of Hull, UK)
7) The Reel Representation of the Real: Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained as Human Rights Discourse - Kate Temoney (Florida State University, US)
8) Hark, Hark, the (dis)Enchanted Kantian Or: Tarantino's 'Evil' and its Anti-Cathartic Resonance - Dara Waldron (Limerick Institute of Technology, UK)
Part IV. Violence and Gender: the Value of Shackles, or Breaking Boundaries
9) Value and Violence in Django Unchained - William Brown (U of Roehampton, London, UK)
10) "Blasting Boundaries: Gender, Genre, and Sadism in Django Unchained" - Sharon Willis (U of Rochester, US)
11) "'Someday my prince will come': Rescue Missions and Black Female Embodiment in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained" - Kimberly Nichele Brown (VCU, US)
Part V. Questions of Race and Representation: What is a "Black Film"?
12) "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Film": "What does it mean to be a black film in twenty-first century America?" - Heather Ashley Hayes (Whitman College) and Gilbert B. Rodman (U of Minnesota, US)
13) Django Blues: Whiteness and Hollywood's continued failures - David J. Leonard (Washington State University, US)
14) Appendix: Interview with Quentin Tarantino
Bibliography
Filmography
Index