Unheeded history: screening savage native Americans in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

ABSTRACT

This article examines how historiographic metafiction challenges traditional narratives of history. The author argues that subverting conventions of narrating the past through irony and a plurality of truths, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) can be regarded as historiographic metafiction. Its narratives of the past challenge the traditional History, provide alternate ways of telling history and invite a more meaningful cognitive engagement with history. To explore how the Americanization of the Holocaust sheds light on American racism, the author focuses on the figure of the savage Native American in the film and examines how Native Americans are brought into play through a plot that mixes up the histories of American settlers, African-Americans, Jews, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians and how the film screens Native Americans in the sight of psychoanalytic theorist Kaja Silverman’s terms of the look, the screen, and the gaze. I argue that the screening of savage Native Americans is in a constant process of renewal and the image of Native Americans is ironic rather than simply stereotypical, which contests dominant Hollywood representations of Native Americans either as ignoble savage or noble savage and reveals unheeded history.

KEYWORDS:

• Multiplicity of history
• metafiction
• parody
• savage native americans
• tarantino’s inglourious basterds

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisors Prof. Dr. Frans-Willem Korsten and Prof. Dr. Maria Boletsi for all their help with the research behind this paper. My gratitude also goes to the anonymous reviewers for the detailed and insightful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. As Greg M. Colón Semenza (2014) argues: ‘Numerous critics have pointed out the clear parallel between the violent artistry of Aldo the Apache and Tarantino the director,’ Tarantino’s interest in the image of Native Americans may be due to the fact that Tarantino himself is part Cherokee (77).

2. As to how these three notions are related, Mieke Bal (1997) argues that the screen ‘makes the stereotypical, prefabricated images and ideal images available for the look’ and shapes the formless gaze into forms (Silverman in Bal, 65).

3. Here I talk about the idea of amplification as proposed by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam. See (Shohat and Stam 1994a) and (Shohat and Stam 1994b).

4. For more discussions on the representations of Native Americans in Hollywood, see (Rollins and O’Conner 2003), (Raheja 2011), and (Aleiss 2008).

5. Blood quantum as a means to identify Native Americans has also been discussed by Karren Baird-Olson (2003), who argues: ‘The use of fractions of blood degree as the primary means of categorizing social groups was legally recognized as early as 1705 and later supported by scientifically racist theories and the ongoing hegemonic strategy designed to create the illusion that American Indians “vanish” when their White or other non-Indian blood quantum reaches a certain level, typically considered to be three fourths. Today, this technique is called statistical genocide’ (194–95).

6. Many critics criticize Tarantino for his overzealous use of the N-word and awkward frankness when he talks about racial stereotypes, and label him as a racist. See (Woodcock 2020) and (Sharf 2019).

7. The discussion will be expanded later when I discuss another word ‘Injun’ in relation to Native Americans.

8. For a more detailed study of ‘good Indian’ and ‘bad Indian,’ see (Chen 2018, 146–151).

9. Based on Peeren’s discussion on the differences between specter, phantom, spook, and ghost, I prefer to use ‘ghost’ to describe the ghostly image of Native Americans. See (Peeren 2014).

10. For a detailed discussion of the myth of the golem, see (Barzilai 2016).

11. For more introduction of ‘the remnants’, see (Amossy and Heidingsfield 1984). According to them, ‘remnants’ refer to elements which ‘perversely disturb this harmony of fixed traits reunited in a stable pattern’ (693).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the the Social Science Planning Office of Shandong Providence, P. R. China [19DWWJ04].

Notes on contributors

Cui Chen

Cui Chen Ph.D. (2017, Leiden University), is an assistant professor at Shandong University. Her research focuses on the notion of the savage in relation to representations of Native Americans and on theoretical attempts to dismantle the Eurocentric notion of the savage in the Western discourse. Her recently published articles are ‘The Child Savage: Rethinking the Eurocentric Rhetoric of Civilization in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies,’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 62:2, 180-189, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2020.1782327 and ‘“A Flake of Obsidian”: The Mother’s Suicide and Redemption in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,’ The Explicator, 78:2, 113-117, DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2020.1777385.

Fuying Shen

Fuying Shen Ph.D. The dean of the School of Translation and Interpretation Studies and the vice dean of the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Shandong University. Being a professor and doctoral supervisor, she primarily conducts research on British and American modernist literature.