Rescue US: Birth, Django, and the Violence of Racial Redemption
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2018, Vol 9, Issue 1
Abstract
In this article, I show how the relationship between race, violence, and redemption is articulated and visualized through film. By juxtaposing DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, I contend that the latter inverts the logic of the former. While Birth sacrifices black bodies and explains away anti-black violence for the sake of restoring white sovereignty (or rescuing the nation from threatening forms of blackness), Django adopts a rescue narrative in order to show the excessive violence that structured slavery and the emergence of the nation-state. As an immanent break within the rescue narrative, Tarantino’s film works to “rescue” images and sounds of anguish from forgetful versions of history.
Authors and Affiliations
Joseph Winters
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25889
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9010021
- Views 296
- Downloads 7
In the Study of the Witch: Women, Shadows, and the Academic Study of Religions
This article examines historically competing categories of magic and religion and their gendered traces in the history of religious studies. On one hand, we have a genealogy that traces the term, “magic”, back to an ea...
Nurses’ Perceptions of Spirituality and Spiritual Care in Different Health Care Settings in the Netherlands
This paper shows similarities and differences in perceptions and competences regarding spirituality and spiritual care of nurses in different health care settings. Research on this specific topic is limited and can con...
The Scythe and the Pentagram: Santa Muerte from Folk Catholicism to Occultism
Santa Muerte is establishing a presence among practitioners of contemporary occultism in Europe and North America. The occult milieu is highly different from the Mexican cult of Santa Muerte, having a strong heritage o...
Brazilian Validation of the Attachment to God Inventory (IAD-Br)
Bowlby’s Attachment Theory proposes that the person seeks protection and security with his or her caregiver, establishing a significant bond, which Bowlby characterizes as “attachment relationship”. The relationship wi...
Religious Knowledge, Ineffability and Gender
The issue of ineffability constitutes a significant challenge in the philosophy of religion. In this paper, I first argue that it is difficult to see how the traditional approach, which I call ‘the metaphysical approac...