Response: Intertextuality, Politics, and the Present Tense in Django Unchained

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Spike Lee, “Twitter Post,” December 22, 2012.

² Jelani Cobb, “Tarantino Unchained,” New Yorker, January 2, 2013.

³ Pamela McClintock, “African Americans Turn Out in Force for Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 2, 2013.

⁴ For example, for Owen Gleiberman, of Entertainment Weekly, “it’s a low-down orgy of flamboyant cruelty and violence: whippings, a scene in which a man gets torn apart by dogs, plus the most promiscuous use of the N-word ever heard in a mainstream movie. Is Django attacking the cruelty or reveling in it?” (“Review: Django Unchained,” Entertainment Weekly, January 8, 2013).

⁵ Aaron Couch, “Journalist Samuel L. Jackson Urged to Use N-Word Speaks Out,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 5, 2013.

⁶ Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 80. Rape was the structuring condition of southern economies: It permitted the originary “commercial vitiation of motherhood as a means for the reproduction and conveyance of property and black subordination,” 84.

⁷ Kate Masur, “In Spielberg’s Lincoln, Passive Black Characters,” New York Times, November 12, 2012. For Masur, compellingly, Lincoln wants “to see emancipation as a gift from white people to black people, not as a social transformation in which African-Americans themselves played a role.”

⁸ Aristotle, Politics, Book 1, chap. 6. “From the Hour of their Birth,” Aristotle writes, “Some are Marked out for Subjection, Others for Rule.” (Book 1, chap. 5).