“Dollar in the Teeth”: Upsetting the Post-Western after Leone or Worlding the Western

Abstract

This article aims to show the complex cultural and political intertextualities that feed into Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” as a post-Western through examining its relationships with Jamaican reggae and film, Blaxploitation, and the many traditions of the US Western in popular culture.

Keywords:

• post-Western
• worlding
• reggae
• spaghetti Westerns

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 36.

² Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 217.

³ Ibid., 217.

⁴ Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 63.

⁵ Deleuze, Cinema 2, 216.

⁶ Ibid., 220.

⁷ Ibid., 217.

⁸ Ibid., 217.

⁹ Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 63.

¹⁰ Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, 7.

¹¹ Wilson and Connery, The Worlding Project, 210.

¹² Ibid., 212.

¹³ Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 64.

¹⁴ “Westerns are always a magnifying glass as far as that’s concerned.” Tarantino speaking with Terry Gross, “Quentin Tarantino, ‘Unchained’ And Unruly,” National Public Radio (npr.org 2013).

¹⁵ See Campbell, The Rhizomatic West; Campbell, Post-Westerns.

¹⁶ Gunst, Born Fi’ Dead, xv.

¹⁷ See Keresztesi, “Cowboys and West Indians,” for more on this.

¹⁸ Ong in Roy and Ong, Worlding Cities, 12.

¹⁹ Ibid., 12.

²⁰ Tsing, Friction, 5.

²¹ Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 6–7.

²² Tsing, Friction, 6.

²³ Leone in Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, 135.

²⁴ The single reached No. 5 in the UK charts in November 1969. I was aged twelve at the time.

²⁵ Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 421.

²⁶ Chude-Sokei, “But I Did Not Shoot the Deputy,” 139.

²⁷ Perry quoted in GUNS! BLOOD! REVENGE! REGGAE!: Scratch pioneers a reggae sub-genre http://www.upsetter.net/scratch/station/2000/2000_django.htm 2000 (accessed November 2014).

²⁸ Sufferah or “sufferer” means a poor but righteous person in Jamaican patois.

²⁹ Michael Thompson remembers this period at FLICKR http://www.flickr.com/photos/freestylee/5055422167/.

³⁰ Chude-Sokei, “But I Did Not Shoot the Deputy,” 164.

³¹ Bradley, Bass Culture, 185.

³² Obika Gray quoted in Randolph Persaud, Counter-Hegemony and Foreign Policy, 97.

³³ Chude-Sokei, “But I Did Not Shoot the Deputy,” 137.

³⁴ Ibid., 137.

³⁵ Deleuze, Cinema 2, 217.

³⁶ Ibid., 218.

³⁷ Ibid., 147.

³⁸ Fisher, “A Cult Called Django,” online.

³⁹ Cooper, Sound Clash, 151–2.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 152.

⁴¹ Stanley-Niaah, “Kingstons’s Dancehall,” 115.

⁴² Cooper, Sound Clash, 154.

⁴³ Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 31.