{"title":"Shake my hand: Racial fantasies, white saviors, and Django Unchained's haunted screen","authors":"Sarah Hagelin","doi":"10.1111/jpcu.13251","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay offers a critical re-assessment of the character King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) in Quentin Tarantino's <i>Django Unchained</i> (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, <i>Django Unchained</i> 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.</p>","PeriodicalId":46552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Popular Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Popular Culture","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jpcu.13251","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"CULTURAL STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
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.
期刊介绍:
The popular culture movement was founded on the principle that the perspectives and experiences of common folk offer compelling insights into the social world. The fabric of human social life is not merely the art deemed worthy to hang in museums, the books that have won literary prizes or been named "classics," or the religious and social ceremonies carried out by societies" elite. The Journal of Popular Culture continues to break down the barriers between so-called "low" and "high" culture and focuses on filling in the gaps that a neglect of popular culture has left in our understanding of the workings of society.