Rescue US: Birth, Django, and the Violence of Racial Redemption

In this article, I show how the relationship between race, violence, and redemption is articulated and visualized through film. By juxtaposing DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, I contend that the latter inverts the logic of the former. While Birt...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Religions
Main Author: Winters, Joseph (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: MDPI [2018]
In: Religions
Further subjects:B Birth of a Nation
B Django Unchained
B Violence
B Race
B Redemption
B Griffith
B Cinema
B Tarantino
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Description
Summary:In this article, I show how the relationship between race, violence, and redemption is articulated and visualized through film. By juxtaposing DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, I contend that the latter inverts the logic of the former. While Birth sacrifices black bodies and explains away anti-black violence for the sake of restoring white sovereignty (or rescuing the nation from threatening forms of blackness), Django adopts a rescue narrative in order to show the excessive violence that structured slavery and the emergence of the nation-state. As an immanent break within the rescue narrative, Tarantino's film works to “rescue” images and sounds of anguish from forgetful versions of history.
ISSN:2077-1444
Contains:Enthalten in: Religions
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.3390/rel9010021