“You ain’t gonna get away wit’ this, Django”: Fantasy, fiction and subversion in Quentin Tarantino’s, Django Unchained

From 2009 to 2015, U.S. director, Quentin Tarantino, released three films that were notable for their focus on particular historical events, periods and individuals (Inglorious Basterds 2009; Django Unchained 2012; The Hateful Eight 2015). Together, these films offered a specifically “Tarantinian” rendering of history: rewriting, manipulating and, for some, unethically deploying history for aesthetic effect. With regard to Django Unchained, this article examines how Tarantino’s historical revisionism provides a valuable point of inquiry into the ways in which “history” is depicted on-screen and, more importantly, how depictions of “the past” can prove useful for highlighting underlying contradictions, ambivalences and ambiguities in the “present”. Drawing upon Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian approach to film analysis, it is argued that through a combination of fantasy, subversion and counterfactual possibility – most notable in the film’s final stand-off between its leading black characters – Tarantino is able to render the Real of U.S. slavery as an ahistorical antagonism. This antagonism highlights the ongoing trauma of these events in the present as well as the use of fantasy to explore their traumatic subject matter. Such historical fictions are not fixed to the past but, via an encounter with the Real, can be used to appraise the present

Afro-Superheroes: Prepossessing the Future

In ‘Popular Arts in Africa’, published in 1987, Karin Barber made passing reference to the syncretic use made of Marvel Comic superheroes alongside figures from Twi folktales, in comics produced in Accra and Kumasi in the 1970s (1987). In these comics, Marvel superheroes and folklore figures, she wrote, have in common their special powers, and a past that stretches beyond the lives of everyday Ghanaians. In the explosion of these figures into the lives of ordinary people, their special powers offer political transformation and access to an otherworldly (sometimes, but not always, ancestrally supported) ability to change this world. The increasing visibility of African superheroes (or what Adilifu Nama has termed so memorably ‘Super Blacks’, 2011) might look, from a certain point of view, like evidence of the increasing infiltration of transnational consumerism into youth cultural forms in African contexts. The papers in this collection on Afro-superheroes argue the opposite: Afro-superheroes, the authors show in their analysis of their often arresting material, are embedded in contemporary political and social contexts and provide us with ways of understanding the emergent present