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...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
[2018]
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| In: |
Religions
Year: 2018, Volume: 9, Issue: 1, Pages: 1-15 |
| 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 Volltext (Publisher) Volltext (doi) |
| 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. |
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| ISSN: | 2077-1444 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religions
|
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.3390/rel9010021 |
