Taking place in America’s pre-civil war South, nonhuman animals in Django Unchained (2012) remain deeply embedded in western American life in terms of symbolic identity, use, and companionship. Tarantino’s inversion of human hierarchal systems as they pertain to race may perhaps additionally expose our contradictory and complex relations with animals. American hunting scenes in the film yield fruitful examples of the nature of human and nonhuman relationships, two of which include the KKK search for Django and the hunt for the escaped Mandingo fighter. During the classic American hunting scenario, a (white) male human, often on horseback, uses nonhuman animals to track down and capture prey. During the Mandingo hunt, the plantation owner, Calvin Candie leads the hunting ceremony, as the black slave is placed in a position among the nonhuman animal group. However, in making a black slave a skilled hunter and hero in the film, Tarantino turns the traditional hunting structure on its head. The usual positions are reversed; the previously hunted becomes the hunter and vice versa. Thus, for example, typical power positions change when Django, the black male hero in the film, appears in a western town on horseback. Tarantino underlines this image as all of the townspeople gaze in shock of a black male riding into town on horseback. Two theoretical texts that should prove useful in this analysis include Jacques Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am” and The Beast and the Sovereign Volumes I and II. Additionally, Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal help to understand the social and political reasons for such hierarchal systems as those portrayed in the film.
About the presenterJamie Lynn Johnson
I have a B.A. in English, an M.A. in English and a PhD in Comparative Studies. I currently teach at Nova Southeastern University. My scholarship focuses on the philosophy of the animal in literature.