Transition 112

Iu Press Journals

Description

Published three times per year by Indiana University Press for the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate. In issue 112, the editors of Transition look at violence, particularly as it relates to the history of slavery, which raises the question of representation. Textbooks and television both grapple with the same fundamental questions: to whom do the stories of slaves belong? How should these stories be told? In this issue, Daniel Itzkovitz talks with Tony Kushner about the controversy that surrounded the making of Lincoln, a serious and sober film about the passage of the 13th Amendment. Django Unchained covers the same time period but uses a wildly different lens. The film is terrifying and topsy-turvy, and has ignited controversy that became a white-hot conflagration. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. speaks with Quentin Tarantino about the making of his film, and a host of scholars and critics, including Walter Johnson, Glenda Carpio, and Terri Francis, set the issue ablaze with provocative and searing commentary that speaks to the controversial film and its potent afterlife.

Sujets

• Popular Culture
• African
• History of art
• African people
• ART

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 20 février 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253018625
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

TRANSITION
Transition was founded in 1961 in Uganda by the late Rajat Neogy and quickly established itself as a leading forum for intellectual debate. The first series of issues developed a reputation for tough-minded, far-reaching criticism, both cultural and political, and this series carries on the tradition .
TRANSITION 112
AN INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
Editors
Tommie Shelby
Glenda Carpio
Vincent Brown
Visual Arts Editor
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Managing Editor
Sara Bruya
Editorial Assistant
Elisabeth Houston
Image Assistant
Jason Silverstein
Publishers
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Henry Louis Gates, Jr .
Senior Advisory Editor
F. Abiola Irele
Advisory Editors
Laurie Calhoun
Brent Hayes Edwards
Henry Finder
Michael C. Vazquez
Chairman of the Editorial Board
Wole Soyinka
Editorial Board
Elizabeth Alexander
Houston A. Baker, Jr .
Suzanne Preston Blier
Laurent Dubois
bell hooks
Paulin Hountondji
Biodun Jeyifo
Jamaica Kincaid
Toni Morrison
Micere M. Githae Mugo
Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Eve Troutt Powell
Cornel West
William Julius Wilson
CONTENTS
Django Unpacked Transition examines Quentin Tarantino s latest tour de force .
I Like the Way You Die, Boy
Pop aesthetics and fantasy frame Django s violent, lawless world . Transition Editor and cultural critic, Glenda Carpio , examines what it means to make light of the most pernicious period in American history .
Allegories of Empire
Outrage and alienation converge in the figures of Christopher Dorner and Django. Historian Walter Johnson considers how both outlaw-heroes erase the past-and leap into a dystopian present .
He Can t Say That, Can He?
Film critic Chris Vognar explores the Tarantino shock triumvirate-race, violence, and comedy-and decides yes, he can .
Looking Sharp
Entertainment and history are uneasy companions, and the discourse that surrounded Django Unchained debated much of this dilemma; how can film use-and not abuse-history? Film scholar Terri Francis probes the question .
An Unfathomable Place
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. talks with Quentin Tarantino about filming slavery, a Django trilogy, the N-word, and white saviors vs. sidekicks .
History Unchained
In Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot points to the question of accuracy vs. authenticity in the historical narrative. Yarimar Bonilla takes up Trouillot s distinction to grapple with the films Django Unchained and Lincoln.
Lincoln and the Radicals
Tony Kushner speaks with Daniel Itzkovitz on Lincoln, why he didn t make a movie about slavery, and his own upbringing in the 1960s segregated-to-integrated South .
Reality Show Poetry
by Jericho Brown
Retracing Nelson Mandela through the Lineage of Black Political Thought
There are heroes that history remembers and records, and there are others that pass through the gates of time quietly and without much fuss. Xolela Mangcu asks us to re-examine the public narrative that surrounds political history-and esteem South Africa s unsung heroes .
Black Beethoven and the Racial Politics of Music History
Nicholas T. Rinehart debunks theories of Beethoven s blackness and calls for a reimagining of the classical canon .
Accordion Dream Poetry
Alternative Monkey
The Heat
The Last Bird
Flower Shop
by Paul r. Harding
Natural Disaster Fiction
by Paula Simone Campbell
Archiving Violence
Anthropologists Mark Schuller and Deborah A. Thomas discuss structural violence, social justice, human rights, and their collaborative filmmaking projects in the Caribbean. A conversation on the making of Poto Mitan and Bad Friday.
Cover: Django. 2013 Mary Solyanick.
Cover of My Negro Novella. Graphite and pastel on paper. 88 72 in. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins Co. 2010 Kara Walker.
I Like the Way You Die, Boy
fantasy s role in Django Unchained
Glenda R. Carpio
And I am taking the story of a slave narrative and blowing it up to folkloric proportions . . . worthy of high opera. So I could have a little fun with it. One of the things I do is when the bad guys shoot people the bullets usually don t blow people apart. They make little holes and they kill them and wound them, but they don t rip them apart. When Django shoots someone, he blows them in half.
-Q UENTIN T ARANTINO
D JANGO U NCHAINED IS not supposed to be experienced or understood as a historically accurate representation of slavery; surprisingly, this point has been lost on many a viewer. It is, as the film critic Chris Vognar rightly notes, a typical Tarantino movie, which is to say that it is more concerned about movies than anything else. At the same time, the film is deeply situated in both the history of cinema and historical fantasy. Tarantino has a little fun telling the story of a slave named Django, a reference to the titular hero of Sergio Corbucci s 1966 spaghetti Western, himself named after the virtuoso jazz musician Django Reinhardt. Tarantino also makes multiple visual and narrative allusions to the blaxploitation tour de force , the 1975 film Mandingo , and other films in this genre- The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972) and its sequels, The Soul of Nigger Charley (1973) and Boss Nigger (1975), as well as direct and oblique references to Norse mythology, to D.W. Griffith s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and the novel that inspired it (Thomas Dixon s 1905 The Clansman ), to the slave narrative genre, and a host of other cultural artifacts. But Django Unchained also jolts viewers with scenes of chattel slavery that are so violently horrific that watching without squirming is impossible, as when a slave is torn apart by dogs or when two slaves are made to fight each other to death with bare hands. The combination of Tarantino having a little fun and his subject matter, arguably the mostly explosive and, especially from a contemporary perspective, most earnestly treated topic in American history, risks trivialization. Yet Django Unchained is also a richly allusive cultural text that, through its intertextuality and its arguably excessive use of violence, makes vivid the brutality of American chattel slavery.
Tarantino s willingness to treat a national wound with pop aesthetics is startling, but it also suggests why popular culture has the potential to get at topics that more highbrow forms can miss. In avoiding the solemnity of polite and earnest forms of expression, as in Amistad or Schindler s List , for instance, films like Django Unchained confront viewers with the raw brutality of the past-the scene in which a slave is torn to pieces by dogs has historical referents-while giving free expression to fantasies, in this case that of revenge. The seemingly contradictory combination of fun (form) and heaviness (subject) has other effects. Tarantino s blowing up of the slave narrative to folkloric proportions shuttles viewers between the comic and horrific, keeping them from settling in any one of the two poles for too long. This produces a series of jolts, which heighten the violence represented at times to let viewers enjoy the revenge fantasy, at others to make them witness slavery s violence. Take for instance the scene in which we are introduced to Big Daddy, the owner of a lusciously rendered plantation where King Schultz and Django are looking for the Brittle Brothers. Played by Don Johnson of Miami Vice fame, Big Daddy is dressed in an impeccable cream-colored suit-a Colonel Sanders meets Miami Vice look, as Sharen Davis, costume designer for the film puts it. The meeting of these three characters is tense mainly because Django rides up in front of Big Daddy s white house on a horse, a capital sin in antebellum America, but once Schultz mentions big money, Big Daddy welcomes both, though he is markedly less polite to Django. The scene that follows is one in which Big Daddy has to explain to one of his female slaves how to treat Django who, as Schutlz informs him, is free. What is a free black man and how to treat him? Tarantino treats us to a slowed down, mellow comedy in which Big Daddy struggles to explain these concepts and indeed, to understand them. From this scene we cut to Django, dressed as Schultz s valet in an outfit he picked out himself-a blue jacket and knee britches, a white ruffle jabot, and white stockings-for which a slave makes fun of him: So you really free? . . . You mean you wanna dress like that? Yet Django, in his blue suit, wreaks vengeance on the same men that brutally lashed his wife and that were about to brutalize another black woman. The slow comedy we enjoy at the expense of Big Daddy turns to the speedy and action-filled drama of Django s first acts of revenge in the film. He does not blow apart his first body-the first Brittle brother falls like timber after a bullet pierces him through a page of the Bible he has sacrilegiously pinned to his chest. But then Django is just getting started. His blue suit was inspired by Thomas Gainsborough s 1770 painting The Blue Boy, a highly prized commodity (when the painting was sold to the railway pioneer Henry Edwards Huntington, it fetched a record breaking price). Casting Django in his blue suit nods to the practice in the history of art of ennobling purportedly primitive people by dressing and framing them after the fashion of noblemen-a title to which Big Daddy, in his fine suit and grand plantation aspires. And yet, in his blue suit Django makes ironic both Big Daddy s aspirations and the civility and commodity culture that Gainsborough s painting came to represent. Blue Boy he ain t.
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