Notes and Quotes - WORK IN PROGRESS

NOTES AND QUOTES – DJANGO UNCHAINED

Topic explored: Is Django Unchained a product of a creative interpretation or an exploitation of cultural appropriation?

INTERNET LINKS

RadioTimes: Freeview film of the day: Django Unchained 14/10/16 – Barry Norman

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-10-14/freeview-film-of-the-day-django-unchained

·       “Quentin Tarantino is a sort of Marmite among film-makers; people either like his work or loathe it. I like it. Very much, and largely for two reasons — his idiosyncratic and unconventional approach to every subject he chooses and the richness of his dialogue.”

·       “It is also very violent but then all Tarantino’s movies are because he picks violent subjects.  What’s more, that dialogue is liberally spattered with four-letter oaths and the now infamous n-word, which crops up in most of his movies and has earned him much criticism.”

·       “What follows is a hectic, blood-, bullet- and body-splattered adventure of some complexity, which without overstressing the point brings out the gross enormity of slavery.

Newyorker: Tarantino Unchained 02/01/2013 - Jelani Cobb

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/tarantino-unchained

·       “The theme of revenge permeates Tarantino’s work. If the violence in his films seems gratuitous, it’s also deployed as a kind of spiritual redemption. And if this dynamic is applicable anywhere in American history, it’s on a slave plantation.”

·       “From its opening scene, “Django” inverts this scenario. Here is the spaghetti Western about an ex-slave turned bounty hunter who takes the bloody business of emancipation into his own hands. This is not Tarantino’s best film but it is probably his most clever. He plays fast and loose with history here, but there are risks implicit in doing this with a film about slavery that aren’t nearly as significant in toying with the history of the West.”

“Primary among these concerns is the frequency of with which Tarantino deploys the n-word. If ever there were an instance in which the term was historically fitting it would seem that a Western set against the backdrop of slavery—a Southern—would be it. Yet the term appears with such numb frequency that “Django” manages to raise the epithet to the level of a pronoun. (I wonder whether the word “nigger” is spoken in the film more frequently than the word “he” or “she.”)”

"From its opening scene, “Django” inverts this scenario. Here is the spaghetti Western about an ex-slave turned bounty hunter who takes the bloody business of emancipation into his own hands.

 This is not Tarantino’s best film but it is probably his most clever. He plays fast and loose with history here, but there are risks implicit in doing this with a film about slavery that aren’t nearly as significant in toying with the history of the West. 

The history of the West is settled in ways that are not the case for the history of the American South and slavery. 

The film’s premise alone was enough to spark controversy. Spike Lee—a longtime critic of Tarantino—took the unwieldy position that he refused to see the film but knew that it would be disrespectful to his ancestors."

"In “Django,” the director creates an audacious black hero who shoots white slavers with impunity and lives to tell about it. In the Harlem theatre where I saw the film, the largely black audience cheered each time an overseer met his end. There is a noble undertaking at the heart of all this gunplay. 

Django, played brilliantly by Jamie Foxx, and King Schultz, his white bounty-hunter mentor—played by an equally adroit Christoph Waltz—are on a mission to rescue Hildy, the enslaved woman Django loves. 

The trade-off for an audience indulging in that emotionally powerful and rarely depicted brand of black heroism is overlooking aspects of the film that were at least as troubling as the other parts were affirming."

Primary among these concerns is the frequency of with which Tarantino deploys the n-word. If ever there were an instance in which the term was historically fitting it would seem that a Western set against the backdrop of slavery—a Southern—would be it. 

Yet the term appears with such numb frequency that “Django” manages to raise the epithet to the level of a pronoun. (I wonder whether the word “nigger” is spoken in the film more frequently than the word “he” or “she.”)

 Had the word appeared any more often it would have required billing as a co-star. At some point, it becomes difficult not to wonder how much of this is about the film and how much is about the filmmaker. Given the prominence of the word in “Pulp Fiction” and “Jackie Brown”—neither of which remotely touch on slavery—its usage in “Django” starts to seem like racial ventriloquism, a kind of camouflage that allows Tarantino to use the word without recrimination.

This is just the first path in the labyrinth of racial concerns that “Django” constructs. Here, as in “Lincoln,” black people—with the exception of the protagonist and his love interest—are ciphers passively awaiting freedom.

 Django’s behavior is so unrepentantly badass as to make him an enigma to both whites and blacks who encounter him. For his part, Django never deigns to offer a civil word to any other slave, save his love interest. In a climactic scene, Django informs his happily enslaved nemesis that he is the one n-word in ten thousand audacious enough to kill anyone standing in the way of freedom.

Is this how Americans actually perceive slavery? More often than not, the answer to that question is answered in the affirmative. It is precisely because of the extant mythology of black subservience that these scenes pack such a cathartic payload. The film’s defenders are quick to point out that “Django” is not about history.

But that’s almost like arguing that fiction is not reality—it isn’t, but the entire appeal of the former is its capacity to shed light on how we understand the latter. 

In my sixteen years of teaching African-American history, one sadly common theme has been the number of black students who shy away from courses dealing with slavery out of shame that slaves never fought back.

It seems almost pedantic to point out that slavery was nothing like this. The slaveholding class existed in a state of constant paranoia about slave rebellions, escapes, and a litany of more subtle attempts to undermine the institution. 

Nearly two hundred thousand black men, most of them former slaves, enlisted in the Union Army in order to accomplish en masse precisely what Django attempts to do alone: risk death in order to free those whom they loved. 

Tarantino’s attempt to craft a hero who stands apart from the other men—black and white—of his time is not a riff on history, it’s a riff on the mythology we’ve mistaken for history. Were the film aware of that distinction, “Django” would be far less troubling—but it would also be far less resonant. 

The alternate history is found not in the story of vengeful ex-slave but in the idea that he could be the only one.

Hollywood Reporter: Spike Lee: 'Django Unchained' is 'Disrespectful,' I Will Not See It. 24/12/2012 – Jordan Zakarin

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/spike-lee-django-unchained-is-406313

·       Lee has long been a critic of Tarantino, whose films often deal with race in controversial ways. Following the release of Tarantino's 1997 blacksploitation tribute, Jackie Brown, Lee said, “I have a definite problem with Quentin Tarantino’s excessive use of the n-word. And let the record state that I never said that he cannot use that word -- I’ve used that word in many of my films -- but I think something is wrong with him.

·       With its 100-plus uses of the n-word and graphic depiction of slavery, Django has drawn its own debate, with many split on whether it belittles slavery or highlights its atrocities.

·       "He’s smushing slavery and its ills in our faces. It’s not sanitized and pretty,” MSNBC host Toure told The Hollywood Reporter. On the other hand, film critic Dwight Brown told THR that "lots of the violence in the movie feels more like a caricature than a re-enactment. The kind of bloodshed and brutality you’d see in a horror film or a superficial action movie, versus what you might find in a real drama."

The Guardian: Django Unchained: is its portrayal of slavery too flippant? 10/01/2013 – Candace Allen

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jan/10/django-unchained-portrayal-slavery-flippant

"Cue the claque and all the usual suspects. From the film's announcement in early 2011, when copies of the 166-page QT-annotated script first began to circulate in the film blogosphere, controversy was guaranteed. Controversy was banked upon, and to the immense satisfaction of its distributing Weinstein Company, box office-generating controversy is just what we have.”

The story: in 1858, three years prior to the American civil war and five years prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, German dentist turned bounty-hunter Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) purchases Jamie Foxx's Django from a chain gang of half-naked, scarred-back slaves walking barefoot through a bleak winter landscape in order to find the criminal Brittle Brothers.

 Django, who desires reunion with his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), far more than sight of the next day's sun, shows an uncanny talent for the game, so Schultz suggests a pact: Django helps him collect a season of bounties for one-third of the loot and he will help Django liberate his true love. 

As punishment for chasing freedom with Django, the proud, beautiful Broomhilda has been sold to Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), owner of the notorious Candyland plantation, a devotee/breeder of slave-on-slave Mandingo fighting and an all-round nasty piece of work. 

Candie's greatest ally, and "house slave" par excellence, is Samuel L Jackson's magnificent Stephen (Stepin Fetchit if he'd ever been very smart and very, very mean). Wagner's Ring cycle is cited. Not without reason. The journey is mythic in its challenges, and very bloody.

First offence Trash-talking, know-nothing, wannabe-hipster white boy dares focus his sleazy sensibilities on the American holocaust of slavery. 

Predictably, first to the post is fellow filmmaker Spike Lee, who declares Django disrespectful of slavery. "Slavery was not a spaghetti western," he says, steadfastly refusing to view the film. 

Close behind Lee stands a phalanx of tried and true veterans of the 20th century's culture wars, who chime in with expected though often highly entertaining tropes, such as writers Ishmael Reed – "[Django] is a Tarantino home movie with all the racist licks that appear in his other movies"; and Cecil Brown – [Django] is "Hollywood's nigger joke" [which unintentionally] "reveals the inner game of how the Hollywood studio and the plantation slave institutions [have] exploited black people".

While discomfort with the idea of Django among those who follow and care about such things was multi-generational prior to the film's release, determined distaste for the film after viewing has been dominated by those of a certain age, who fought honourably and with reasonable success to change all aspects of African American degradation, who, out of necessity, pride and territoriality, remain ever vigilant for crimes against African-American dignity. 

Slavery was not a joke and shouldn't be treated as anything remotely touching on such, especially when the study of history is so pitifully neglected in American public schools, especially by a white boy, and especially by this white boy, who wouldn't know respect if it kicked him in the head … to no avail, for African-Americans of all ages have been attending in droves, with box office receipts exceeding all expectations. Reputable white voices are parsing their words carefully.

Second offence The N-word:

 There are those who count these things and Django's N-word count has been given as 110 (while in the once-notorious Jackie Brown it was a mere 38). Actor Leo DiCaprio has spoken of his discomfort at having to use the word, giving himself over to his character's hideousness when colleagues Jackson and Foxx counselled that only thus could he descend to Calvin Candie's depths, where the word was common currency.

 Washington describes herself and Foxx creating a psychological "N-word shield" during days of shooting when usage was at its peak. The fact that the word's usage was era-appropriate holds little sway with those who'd rather it be disappeared for all time.

I thought the spaghetti-western references – in music, colour saturation, use of titles, costuming, set design, buckets of blood, mythologising – an entertaining hoot. 

Though the violence of Django's revenge was grand guignol in its excess, the two places most emotionally fraught in terms of the brutal true nature of slavery, the flogging of Broomhilda and the Mandingo fighting (at the end of which I admittedly had to shield my eyes) were dealt with in a manner far more Coppola than Peckinpah (or Tarantino for that matter).

I did not find offence in QT's use of the word "nigger". In earlier films one could sense the man's romance with the word was akin to that of a small child taking rapturous joy in being potty-mouthed. That tendency is not present in Django. 

In 1858 the word was used for black people in both North and South, by both black and white, by "men of good will" like Mark Twain and evil racist sons of bitches. I submit that, given Django's circumstances, the word was used with restraint. A film about slavery with any verisimilitude would be absurd anachronism if the word was avoided to soothe modern sensibilities.

 To those who fear that any usage of the word confers it legitimacy, I say that those wishing to join their vocabularies and destinies with the likes of Candie are already far gone down the road to perdition and diagnostic tools to ferret them out are always helpful. Presently the word is in the closet, not the grave. Serious discussion and soul-searching demands saying the word.

Jump Cut: Django Unchained: thirteen ways of looking at a black film – 2014 – Heather Ashley Hates and Gilbert B. Rodman

http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/rodman-django/index.html

·       “Django Unchained was heir to a particular set of racial anxieties from its inception, carrying a “burden of representation” on its shoulders that no single film could possibly bear.”

·       “Making a film about chattel slavery in the United States is an inherently dangerous undertaking that is guaranteed to upset a lot of people. Django isn’t an important film, however, simply because it pushes people’s buttons: it is an important film because it tells a story about race and racism that desperately needs to be told.”

·       “Django is a black film. More than that, it is an exemplary black film. We would even go so far as to say that it is one of the most important black films of the century . . . which is where some of you will interrupt us to point out that Quentin Tarantino, the film’s director and screenwriter, is white, making it impossible for Django to be a black film.”

·       “Only black people, the argument goes, have enough first-hand knowledge of “the black experience” to represent that experience properly in art.”

·       “Moreover, even if one believes that Tarantino really is the principal creative force behind “his” films, his most striking auteurish contributions come from his liberal borrowing of shots, scenes, costuming, and characters from Blaxploitation films, martial arts films, spaghetti westerns, and the like. Significantly, most of those genres depend heavily on non-Western, non-white, and/or hybrid aesthetic styles.”

Essentialism is no more helpful than auteurism when it comes to understanding the relationship between artists and their creations. The apparent clarity of a categorical label (such as “black”) hides a messy, thorny tangle (dare we call it a briar patch?) of context-dependent significations: enough so that, when one examines it closely, the essentialist equation—for example, that only “real” black people have access to “authentic” black experience—implodes.

The identity side of the equation depends on the notion that “race” is a natural phenomenon that can be used to accurately place the peoples of the world into discrete, non-overlapping categories. 

In actual practice, however, such categories vary significantly over time and across space—which makes them cultural and historical fictions, rather than universal, scientific facts. Moreover, as the growing population of self-identified multiracial people, should remind us, those categories overlap a great deal. Racial identity is more of a finely granulated spectrum than a simple binary choice, which, in turn, makes it impossible to anchor the identity end of the essentialism equation with any precision.

To understand “black film” in this context is to insist that any film worthy of the label do significant work toward identifying, condemning, and dismantling systemic and institutional racism. It also necessarily opens the door for “fellow travelers”—political allies who are not black—to make “black film.”

This is not to advance some sort of simple “colorblind” claim in which racial identity is wholly irrelevant to someone’s capacity for making black film. 

Undoubtedly, it is much harder for white filmmakers (be they directors or not) to make “black film” than it is for black filmmakers to do so, since most white people have never had to face the harsh realities of systemic racism in the way that people of color (filmmakers or not) are forced to every day. 

Because the meaningful relationship here, however, is about articulation, rather than identity, it is still possible (even if it is rare) for white people to make black films. We would not claim that all (or even most) of Tarantino’s directorial efforts meet the criteria we describe here—but Django most certainly does.

One of the most troubling aspects of the auteurist bias in the public discourse around Django is the way that commentators have routinely overlooked the agency of the film’s black actors. For example, a Movie maniacs round table interview with Tarantino and the film’s major cast members begins with a question for Tarantino about his “sense of responsibility...in terms of making a movie that brings slavery out front and center like this,” but the actors are not addressed as if they, too, had made important creative contributions to the film. Instead, they are asked for their thoughts on Tarantino’s artistic vision.

 Similarly, in an ABC News Nightline interview with Tarantino, Foxx, and DiCaprio, Cynthia McFadden spends several minutes focusing on the risks that Tarantino took by using “the n-word” so liberally, and the risks that DiCaprio took by choosing to play a character of “pure evil” in a supporting role—but she has nothing to say that recognises the choices (risky or otherwise) that Foxx made with respect to Django (ABC News, 2013). 

Even Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (who really should know better) spends the majority of a three-part interview with Tarantino about the film (2012a, 2012b, 2012c) asking questions that frame the film as the exclusive by-product of Tarantino’s creative vision.

Perhaps the most ironic version of this erasure of black agency, however, comes from Dexter Gabriel (2013). In an otherwise convincing essay about the history of Hollywood’s (largely abysmal) efforts to depict slavery, he derides Django as nothing more than a white fantasy about black acquiescence:

“While Django (Jamie Foxx) takes his cues from Blaxploitation, his fellow slaves seem throwbacks to the old plantation epics. Dazed and voiceless, they stand around as backdrops to Django’s heroics. The one standout role, the sinister Stephen (Samuel Jackson), recycles ‘Lost Cause’ caricatures of the faithful Tom stitched together with contemporary African-American folklore on so-called house versus field slaves. In this post-racial revision of American history, mythical Uncle Toms and sadistic whites collude to maintain slavery—a clever moral escape-hatch to negate white guilt and guarantee crossover appeal.” (2013)

Vulture: An A-Z Primer to the movie and TV references in Django Unchained – 2012 – Bilge Ebiri

http://www.vulture.com/2012/12/a-guide-to-all-the-movie-and-tv-references-in-django-unchained.html

·       Slavesploitation: This is a catch-all term for a number of films made in the seventies that had explicit antislavery messages but also indulged in so much graphic violence and sex that they were often shown for titillation and provocation. The most notorious of them was probably Goodbye Uncle Tom, an absolutely brutal film by the Italian director Gualtiero Jacopetti that pretended to have been shot by a documentary crew visiting the antebellum South. Django Unchained subtly quotes Goodbye Uncle Tom in its depictions of Southern plantation life set to lush Italian songs. 

Broomhilda von Shaft: Tarantino has said elsewhere that Django and Broomhilda are supposed to be the great-great grandparents of John Shaft, from the Shaft movies. While her name is meant to be inspired by the mythic German female warrior Brunnhilde, "Broom-Hilda" is also the name of a witch from the American comic strip of the same name created in 1970.

Candyland: The ironically playful name of Calvin Candie’s horror-show plantation might be an obvious reference to the popular board game, especially considering that Tarantino himself is a huge board game buff and collector. It could also be a subtle joke, in that Christoph Waltz’s character is a dentist.

·       Django: As many viewers already know, Django was originally the name of a 1967 Spaghetti Western starring Franco Nero, which spawned a number of pseudo-sequels. In classic Spaghetti Western fashion, these were “sequels” only in that lots of other filmmakers simply named their characters Django — not unlike Tarantino did in this film.

The Law: Dr. King Schultz is scrupulous in his respect for the law. This is reminiscent of Klaus Kinski’s Loco, another law-abiding bounty hunter (and also played by a German) in Sergio Corbucci’s evocative and dark snowbound Western, The Great Silence. He was confronted in that film by a mute gunfighter named Silence (Amour’s Jean-Louis Trintignant), who was similarly law-abiding.

The Mandingo Circuit: This concept actually comes from Mandingo, Richard Fleischer’s infamous 1975 big-budget exploitation flick (based on the 1957 novel by Kyle Onstott), which is one of Tarantino’s favorite movies.

Zooms: Tarantino has made zooms part of his trademark style at this point, in homage to many of his beloved sixties and seventies films, particularly kung fu and Italian genre flicks.

“I Got a Name”: Jim Croce’s 1973 hit is prominently heard at one point in the film. It was also the theme song for the southern racing drama The Last American Hero, another Tarantino favorite.

The Sidekick Narrative: The relationship between Django and Dr. King Schultz is similar to the central relationships in many Spaghetti Westerns, particularly those featuring Lee Van Cleef — who often played a veteran, expert cowboy who had to train a younger, wilder protégé, in films like Death Rides a Horse, Day of Anger, and The Stranger and the Gunfighter.

Music: As usual, Tarantino has included lots of musical references to other films in his soundtrack. Among them are several tracks from Sergio Corbucci’s original Django (including the title song) as well as another Corbucci Western, The Hellbenders (which is, notably, about a bunch of unrepentant ex-Confederates who try to start a second American Civil War). Also featured prominently are several tracks from Don Siegel’s Clint Eastwood Western Two Mules for Sister Sara, the song “His Name Is King” from the Spaghetti Western His Name Was King, and some songs from Sergio Sollima’s Italian gangster revenge thriller Violent City.

The Hot Box: The hot box is an actual torture device used in the South, often in prisons. It was also featured famously in the film Cool Hand Luke. (“Any man forgets his number spends a night in the box … Any man loses his spoon spends a night in the box … Any man not in his bunk at eight spends the night in the box … ”)

Nonsite: Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why – 2013 – Adolph Reed

http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why

·       “On reflection, it’s possible to see that Django Unchained and The Help are basically different versions of the same movie. Both dissolve political economy and social relations into individual quests and interpersonal transactions and thus effectively sanitize, respectively, slavery and Jim Crow by dehistoricizing them.”

·       “Django Unchained ends with the hero and his lady fair riding happily off into the sunset after he has vanquished evil slave owners and their henchmen and henchwomen. Django and Broomhilda—whose name is spelled like that of the 1970s comic strip character, not the figure in Norse mythology, presumably a pointless Tarantino inside joke—are free. However, their freedom was not won by his prodigious bloodletting; it was obtained within the legal framework that accepted and regulated property rights in slaves.  Each had been purchased and manumitted by the German bounty hunter who, as others have noted, is the only character in the film to condemn slavery as an institution.”

·      “Regardless, Django’s quest is entirely individualist; he never intends to challenge slavery and never does. Indeed, for the purpose of buttressing the credibility of their ruse, he even countermands his bounty hunter partner’s attempt to save—through purchase, of course—a recalcitrant “Mandingo fighter” from being ripped apart by dogs.  He is essentially indifferent to the handful of slaves who are freed as incidental byproducts of his actions. The happy ending is that he and Broomhilda ride off together and free in a slavocracy that is not a whit less secure at the moment of celebratory resolution than it was when Django set out on his mission of retrieval and revenge.”

·       Django Unchained trivializes slavery by reducing it to its most barbaric and lurid excesses. Slavery also was fundamentally a labor relation. It was a form of forced labor regulated—systematized, enforced and sustained—through a political and institutional order that specified it as a civil relationship granting owners absolute control over the life, liberty, and fortunes of others defined as eligible for enslavement, including most of all control of the conditions of their labor and appropriation of its product.

The Huffington Post: Django Unchained Controversy: A look at the Condundum Tarantino’s Latest Created in Progressive Black America  - 2013 – Jermaine Spradley

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jermaine-spradley/django-unchained-controversy_b_2457739.html

·       “On the other hand, the film’s director is a white man. And not just any white man, he’s a white man who’s had a couple of run-ins with Spike Lee — and while Spike’s standing in the smarty-art black community has been a bit tenuous at times, he’s still on the team. Tarantino is also the kind of white guy who maintains a discomfortingly comfortable relationship with black folks that always seemed to lead to annoyingly awkward. Add to all of that awkwardness Tarantino’s notoriously curious affinity with the n-word, the fact that the word appears in Django Unchained more than 100 times, and the fact that Django’s love interest in the film is none other than... the loathsome Olivia Pope — and you officially have a mind-numbing array of equally awesome and offensive circumstances coalescing.”

·       “Of course, these blaxploitation movies had a different aim than Tarantino necessarily does in Django. Made at a moment when Hollywood was finally recognizing black audiences as an untapped market, the point was to give hope, however fantastical, to those viewers.

·       Django Unchained offers its own slave-revenge fantasy, but it sticks closer to the more conventional aspects of the Western than any of Williamson’s films do — in Tarantino’s world, the outcast individual is mostly in it for himself; he’s not standing up on behalf of his fellow subjugated man. You can choose to identify with Django, but if you do, you’re rooting for his overcoming of oppression, not a collective victory for the black race.”

·       Let me be clear: Django Unchained is by no means a great film. Anyone who tells you that this film is high art worthy of all manner of praise is likely struggling to reconcile the various emotions the film suggests. It is meanderingly long, the characterization leaves much to be desired (as outlined above) and it departs way too far from the historical record for a film essentially billed as a slave narrative. And even if it were a great film — its greatness would not mean it is thereby freed of all critical analysis.

·       Let me also be clear about this: Django Unchained is by no means a racist film. Does the film err on the insensitive side — sure. Is it almost pornographic in its depiction of the brutalization of blacks...? Definitely. But it also gives one of the most shockingly graphic depictions of the horror that was American slavery that we’ve ever seen in a Hollywood film. It also shows just how deeply ingrained racism is in this country. And it also gives us our first big-budget, fictional super-hero slave. Despite its shortcomings, Tarantino has crafted an... interesting... alternative take on a difficult period of this country’s history. Django’s most important achievement is that it forces us to come to terms with the fact that it’s completely possible to be both thoroughly entertained... and thoroughly offended.

BOOKS

Kleisath, C.M. (2014). The Costume of Shangri-La: Thoughts on White Privilege, Cultural Appropriation and Anti-Asian Racism, Journal of Lesbian Studies.

"This piece poses cultural appropriation as an undertheorized aspect of white privilege in White Privilege Studies. "

By way of narrative exploration, it asserts that a paucity of scholarship on Orientalism and anti-Asian racism has created a gap in White Privilege Studies that curbs its radical transformative potential. It argues for the value of a structural and historically focused lens for understanding the issue of cultural appropriation, and extends questions of culture and race relations beyond the borders of the United States. 

It also explores the complex ways that interracial and transnational relationships can influence white racial identity, and illustrates the disruptive potential that queer interracial relationships can offer to dominant historical patterns of white behaviour

Tochluk, S. (2008). Witnessing whiteness: First steps toward an antiracist practice and culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education.

“White people who cannot fully recapture a lost cultural heritage, like me, often experience a real sense of loss. "

Sure, there might be subcultures of whites that feel attached to what they see as a particularly American culture, like those who would claim a “Southern” culture. 

However, many of us find ourselves looking at other groups and longing for the connection we imagine they feel with their roots, their homeland, and their culture. Many white people can be heard saying, “We don’t have culture. They have culture.” 

“The more we understand ourselves, the reasons for our actions, and how our cultural explorations might be perceived in relationship to an oppressive history, the more we are able to navigate our way through challenging conversations, build authentic relationships and break down the wounds built up over years of injury. 

Perhaps even more important, we might be able to avoid enacting a disrespectful form of appropriation.”

Cook, P., & Bernink, M. (1999). The cinema book. London: BFI Pub.
"Hollywood' interest in black film-making seems another version of niche marketing; they remain interested so long as the film provide the successful economic returns that a number of them have achieved.

Color-Blind Ideology and the Cultural Appropriation of Hip-Hop, Jason Rodriquez, University of Massachusetts–Amherst, 2006

• Using ethnographic methods and interviews of members in a local hip-hop scene, I argue that colorblind ideology provides whites with the discursive resources to justify their presence in the scene, and more important, to appropriate hip-hop by removing the racially coded meanings embedded in the music and replacing them with color-blind ones

• Furthermore, it extends our understanding of how color-blind ideology operates in practice, enabling whites with the discursive resources and racial power to culturally appropriate hip-hop, however unintentionally, for their own purposes.

Angier, N. (2000). ‘Do races differ? Not really, DNA shows.’ The New York Times, August 22nd, 2000. 

Scientists have long suspected that the racial categories recognized by society are not reflected on the genetic level. But the more closely that researchers examine the human genome -- the complement of genetic material encased in the heart of almost every cell of the body -- the more most of them are convinced that the standard labels used to distinguish people by "race" have little or no biological meaning

Loscascio, J. (2014). The reality of racism based on the illusion of ‘race’. 

"I believe the concept of race itself as a discrete, qualitative categorization of human beings is a cognitive illusion."

 Many people seem to think there is a gene for race with three settings— White, Black, and Asian. So-called racial differences are the accumulated sum of many slight, mostly surface, variations in physical features involving, among other things, the fold of the eyelids, hair texture, and the amount of epidermal pigmentation, in various permutations and gradations. "

"Variation in skin pigmentation is an evolutionary response to differences in the directness of sunlight across geographical localities, whereby skin color balances protection against ultraviolet radiation with allowance of sunlight needed for formation of Vitamin D."

 These cosmetic “racial” differences vary in a gradual continuity across locations of ancestral origin. It is only in the human mind that a simplified"

https://www.bpc.org.uk/sites/psychoanalytic-council.org/files/BPC%20Bibliography%20(race,%20racism%20and%20ethnicity)%20.pdf

Nama, A. (2015). Race on the QT: Blackness and the films of Quentin Tarantino. Austin: University of Texas Press.

“In contrast to the established history of Hollywood films advancing trite and racist presentations of black enslavement, a wave of militant black slave films did crop up during the high tide of Blaxploitation films in the 1970s, having appropriated the last vestiges of political verve from a waning Black Power movement.”

“In succeeding decades, the overall impact of these representational valances around the deception of African American enslavement in American films was a political mixed bag.”

“Similar to Django Unchained, the main character in 12 Years a Slave is on a quest to reunite with this family after being enslaved for more than a decade. But the tale told by Solomon Northup is a true adaptation of this harrowing proportion of his life…From here, the film explores the daily struggles of enslavement for black folk.

“Yet, despite the psychosexual depravity that is the currency of 12 Years a Slave, it is less a horror film than Django Unchained. Rather 12 Years a Slave relies more on the emotional valances of loss, shame and despair.”

“Fittingly, much has been made of Django Unchained as a black spaghetti western that fashions its cowboy style out of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Sergio Corbucci’s original Django (196)”

“The fanciful is first signaled in the style and speech of Dr. Shultz, a ruthless bounty hunter with aristocratic flair and magniloquent speech patterns”

“Arguably, the character is a symbolic nod to the image of the white abolitionist as an erudite social reformer of tastes and traditions somewhat distinct from American common folk.”

Lawrence, N. (2008). Blaxploitation films of the 1970s: Blackness and genre. New York: Routledge.

"As previously noted, black explotiation films are defined as motion picturres made by both black and white filmmakers between 1970 and 75 in order to exploit the black film audience.

"First, many blaxploitation films were traditional genre films. However, the movies did not exploit specific events. Instead, blaxploitation films often included an intertextual relay within the narrative that focused no past and present issues plaguing America's black population."

Garcia, C. O., Young, V. A., & Pimentel, C. (2014). From Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Help: Critical perspectives on White-authored narratives of Black life. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

"Although Django Unchained is supposedly a depiction of slavery, it is more truly a part of the spaghetti Western genre, in every sense of the word. Even the title, Django, is the same name as a 1960s spaghetti Western film made by Italian filmmaker Sergio Corbucci. 

"In order to understand the stereotypical deceptions of slavery and the enslaved in slave-genre Hollywood films, one must understand the ideological contours of racism in the United States"

Young, L. (1996). Fear of the dark: 'race', gender, and sexuality in the cinema. London: Routledge.

"White people have seen the black Other as an object of and for investigation, and the subject of 'race' relations discourse. In contrast to the effacement and naturalizing of their ethnic location by white film-makers, black cultural practitioners have continually examined their position as specifically black subjects within white cultures."

Bibliography: WORK IN PROGRESS

Books:

1. Angier, N. (2000). ‘Do races differ? Not really, DNA shows.’ The New York Times, August 22nd, 2000. 
2. Garcia, C. O., Young, V. A., & Pimentel, C. (2014). From Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Help: Critical perspectives on White-authored narratives of Black life. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
3. Cook, P., & Bernink, M. (1999). The cinema book. London: BFI Pub. 
4. Kleisath, C.M. (2014). The Costume of Shangri-La: Thoughts on White Privilege, Cultural Appropriation and Anti-Asian Racism, Journal of Lesbian Studies. 
5. Lawrence, N. (2008). Blaxploitation films of the 1970s: Blackness and genre. New York: Routledge.
6. Loscascio, J. (2014). The reality of racism based on the illusion of ‘race’. 
7. Nama, A. (2015). Race on the QT: Blackness and the films of Quentin Tarantino. Austin: University of Texas Press.
8. Tochluk, S. (2008). Witnessing whiteness: First steps toward an antiracist practice and culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education.
9. Young, L. (1996). Fear of the dark: 'race', gender, and sexuality in the cinema. London: Routledge.

Internet links / webpages:

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-10-14/freeview-film-of-the-day-django-unchained

Cobb, J. (2014). Tarantino Unchained. Retrieved December 02, 2016, from http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/tarantino-unchained

Spike Lee: 'Django Unchained' is 'Disrespectful,' I Will Not See It. Retrieved December 02, 2016, from http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/spike-lee-django-unchained-is-406313

Allen, C. (2013). Django Unchained: Is its portrayal of slavery too flippant? Retrieved December 02, 2016, from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jan/10/django-unchained-portrayal-slavery-flippant

http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/rodman-django/index.html

Django Unchained, or, The Help: How. (2014). Retrieved December 02, 2016, from http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why

An A–Z (Minus Some Letters) Primer to the Movie and TV References in Django Unchained. (2012). Retrieved December 02, 2016, from http://www.vulture.com/2012/12/a-guide-to-all-the-movie-and-tv-references-in-django-unchained.html

Spradley, J. (n.d.). Django Unchained Controversy: A Look at the Conundrum Tarantino's Latest Created in Progressive Black America. Retrieved December 02, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jermaine-spradley/django-unchained-controversy_b_2457739.html