Michael K. Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617039287
- eISBN:
- 9781626740013
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617039287.003.0009
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The hybrid genre of the Science Fiction-Western has opened a new space for imagining and performing an African American West. Using settings that are futuristic and/or post-apocalyptic, they free the ...
More
The hybrid genre of the Science Fiction-Western has opened a new space for imagining and performing an African American West. Using settings that are futuristic and/or post-apocalyptic, they free the genre from the (already highly fictionalized) historical setting of the American West. By so doing, film and television westerns with science fiction elements such as Joss Whedon’s Firefly and the Hughes brothers’ post-apocalyptic western film The Book of Eli are able to move beyond the racial mythologies that have long operated within the western. Freed as well from longstanding expectations about African American roles (comic relief, sidekick) in westerns, these narratives experiment with different strategies for performing the role of the black westerner and creatively incorporate elements of African American cultural tradition—slave narratives, trickster tales—into their science fiction frontier adventures. If not quite “after race,” these narratives imagine ways to move beyond earlier ways of conceptualizing African American identity.Less
The hybrid genre of the Science Fiction-Western has opened a new space for imagining and performing an African American West. Using settings that are futuristic and/or post-apocalyptic, they free the genre from the (already highly fictionalized) historical setting of the American West. By so doing, film and television westerns with science fiction elements such as Joss Whedon’s Firefly and the Hughes brothers’ post-apocalyptic western film The Book of Eli are able to move beyond the racial mythologies that have long operated within the western. Freed as well from longstanding expectations about African American roles (comic relief, sidekick) in westerns, these narratives experiment with different strategies for performing the role of the black westerner and creatively incorporate elements of African American cultural tradition—slave narratives, trickster tales—into their science fiction frontier adventures. If not quite “after race,” these narratives imagine ways to move beyond earlier ways of conceptualizing African American identity.
Michael K. Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617039287
- eISBN:
- 9781626740013
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617039287.003.0010
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter looks back at the African American western through the lens of Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s homage to the blaxploitation film and the spaghetti western. In its “deliberate ...
More
This chapter looks back at the African American western through the lens of Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s homage to the blaxploitation film and the spaghetti western. In its “deliberate jarring” of genre expectations, its drawing of attention to its own acts of “poaching and borrowing” from other westerns, Django Unchained is the type of film that critic Neil Campbell calls a “post-western.” That Django Unchained effectively conjoins a story of slavery with a western plot of rescue from captivity, vengeance, and regeneration through violence suggests the surprising affinity between two distinctively American genres—the slave narrative, the western. This concluding chapter offers an assessment of Django Unchained that both acknowledges the film’s accomplishments and interrogates statements that positioned the film as a “new genre,” arguing that assertions of the film’s novelty efface the tradition of the African American western of which Tarantino and film reviewers have seemed largely unaware.Less
This chapter looks back at the African American western through the lens of Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s homage to the blaxploitation film and the spaghetti western. In its “deliberate jarring” of genre expectations, its drawing of attention to its own acts of “poaching and borrowing” from other westerns, Django Unchained is the type of film that critic Neil Campbell calls a “post-western.” That Django Unchained effectively conjoins a story of slavery with a western plot of rescue from captivity, vengeance, and regeneration through violence suggests the surprising affinity between two distinctively American genres—the slave narrative, the western. This concluding chapter offers an assessment of Django Unchained that both acknowledges the film’s accomplishments and interrogates statements that positioned the film as a “new genre,” arguing that assertions of the film’s novelty efface the tradition of the African American western of which Tarantino and film reviewers have seemed largely unaware.
