Response: “Goodbye Miss Lara!” or what’s Slavery got to do with it? Regeneration through Violence inDjango Unchained?

Shake my hand: Racial fantasies, white saviors, and Django Unchained's haunted screen

“…Tarantino's relationship to structural racism in the present is also at the center of Dunham's challenge to the film: “Tarantino unwittingly undermines his own pretensions to social consciousness, producing instead a film that reflects and reproduces the ignorance, strategic silence, and White guilt surrounding America's ongoing history of slavery and racism” (402). In contrast, Joi Carr sees the film as a “challenge [to] the pernicious imagery of black inferiority” (38) and Erica L. Ball, while critiquing the film's ahistoricism and neoliberal sympathies, argues that it provides a genuine “critique of the cinematic plantation tradition” (315). Veronica Fitzpatrick understands “[the film's] articulation of slavery's wrongness and cruelty [as] profound and revolutionary” (319).…”