Django Unchained was released in 2012 and was directed by Quentin Tarantino. The movie stars Jamie Foxx, who plays freed slave Django on his quest to rescue his wife from a brutal slave owner. The movie depicts the extreme injustices that African Americans had to endure in pre-Emancipation America and the identity that a freed slave takes on. 

Django Unchained might just sound like another time-period based action movie to someone who hasn’t seen it, and while the movie does heavily utilize action scenes, Django is a fully fleshed out character who has to deal with his status as a freed slave in America. The movie details the injustices faced by enslaved African Americans and those who are freed through scenes that directly show the crimes against them. While some of these scenes are hard to watch, they show the true evil nature of slavery and the people that owned slaves. After watching the violence that slave owners subjected to the people they enslaved, it’s hard to understand how anyone could still fly the Confederate flag today, which represents that era of America.

A scene in the movie that depicts the injustices freed slaves faced is one of the first in the movie, when Django and the man who freed him, Dr Schultz, enter a saloon for a drink. They are greeted with the bartender freaking out, calling Django racial slurs, then sprinting out of the bar to get the sheriff. They are then asked to leave by the sheriff, who accuses them of causing trouble and scaring all the “nice” people in town. This reaction was caused simply by wanting to get a drink at a saloon. Scenes like these are important to remind people the injustices that  African Americans had to face, and continue to face long after the Emancipation Proclamation. 

Django Unchained addresses the concept of Othering throughout the whole movie, but none more than the scene where slave owner Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, explains to his captive audience of Django, his wife, and Dr. Schultz why he believes that “Africans are meant to be lesser than white people.” Candie uses crude science to back his claims that Africans are a “sub-form” of humans that are designed to be subservient. The character and what he’s saying are so blatantly racist that DiCaprio had a very difficult time completing his lines, yet these ideas are what slave owners genuinely believed. This scene conveys how severe the Othering was of African-Americans in this era of American history. 

 This movie is a must-watch for anyone in this class. The violence in it may be disturbing to some, but it is a highly entertaining movie that is centered around Django’s redemption against those who enslaved him and his mission to rescue his wife. Django Unchained explores many of the concepts we learned in this class, and these concepts will help the viewer engage with the movie deeper. 

Week 13 Contextual Presentation 

As Americans, we tend not to think about the history of the beautiful tropical destinations that we vacation to. We think about the amazing weather, pristine beaches, and exotic landscapes. These destinations are so much more than that, they are the home to so many people, and these people are forced to share their home with tourists year-round. 

Tourism is the newest form of colonization that many nations in the Caribbean face. Jamaica Kincaid’s home of Antigua has been dealing with foreigners since 1493, when it was discovered by Christopher Columbus. Columbus was the one who gave Antigua its name, based off of the Church of Santa Maria de la Antigua in Spain. Antigua was colonized in 1632 by English settlers and remained a British possession for hundreds of years. Antigua became a profitable sugar colony for the British, and these profits were made from the labor of slavery. Initially the British tried using the native people of Antigua, but they quickly became malnourished and disease-ridden. British colonizers imported thousands of enslaved Africans instead to work for them. By the late 1700s, slaves outnumbered colonists 37,000 to less than 3,000, and were forced to live in extremely packed conditions. Any slaves that were suspected of revolting were brutally executed and tortured by slave owners. Eventually in 1834, slavery was abolished in England and its colonies.

The end of slavery in Antigua was a welcome change for those enslaved, but had some adverse affects on the economy. Labor for the sugar crops was harder to find, and natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes left the economy in bad shape. Antigua went back to being a British colony in the late 1800s in hopes to regain stability. Antigua joined Britain’s Leeward Islands Colony, which was composed of several islands in the Caribbean, which was defederated in 1958. Antigua, still looking for stability, joined the West Indies Federation, which was dissolved in 1962. In 1967, Antigua adopted the status of being associated with the U.K, which meant they had complete internal control, but the U.K was responsible for external affairs. Antigua went through an independence movement throughout the 1970s, and was granted full independence in 1981. Since then, the government has gone through many scandals and the nation relies on tourism. 

For a country that has waited so long to finally be independent, being forced to rely on tourism feels like the newest form of colonization. Antigua launched a program that lets people who buy properties of $400,000 or more to become citizens. This program basically allows foreigners to legally colonize and have influence in Antigua. “Yet there was the inescapable fact that the staff was largely brown-skinned and that the guests weren’t, a vestige of slavery throughout the Americas and a reminder of the system of apartheid that Ms. Kincaid derides in A Small Place” (The New York Times). Antigua is a nation that has dealt with colonization for hundreds of years and is still facing the effects of it today.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/travel/antigua-jamaica-kincaid.html 

https://www.britannica.com/place/Antigua-and-Barbuda/History 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigua#Slavery