Django's Prominence, Stephen's Subservience: How Quentin Tarantino Uses, Exploits, and/or Subverts Racist Tropes in Django Unchained (2012) Summer Jade Dolan College

While promoting his new film, Django Unchained, in 2012, director Quentin Tarantino promised audiences ‘ a new, virgin-snow kind of genre’, which he referred to as ‘the Southern’.[1] Tarantino claimed that the originality of the film – which charts the narrative of the titular freed slave, Django, in nineteenth century America, as he is freed by an abolitionist dentist, murders criminals in his new career as a bounty hunter, and ultimately rescues his enslaved wife from a cruel plantation owner – was ‘what made it so fascinating’.[2] Yet, for all of Tarantino’s insistence that Django Unchained was something never done before, critics have argued since its release that many characters within the film are the result of Tarantino’s exploitation of historical and long-established racial stereotypes.[3] On the other hand, Django Unchained has also garnered a lot of support from theorists who have read Tarantino’s use of such stereotypes as an act of subversion, and retaliation against the original racist ideologies that established them.[4] This essay will seek to address this division within current scholarship on the film through examination of two characters in particular – Django and Stephen. Through building upon the works of...