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

Abstract

This essay offers a critical re‐assessment of the character King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), reading the film as a cautionary tale about the danger proximity to whiteness poses for Black subjects. For all of its hyperbolic violence and linguistic excess, Django Unchained asks important questions about the way American popular culture structures stories of African American freedom around the trope of interracial friendship. In doing so, it reveals the problem at the heart of white identity‐making in US popular culture and unmasks its complicity in violence against Black bodies.