Django Unchained: Coonskin Redux?

By Guest Contributor Paul Barrett; originally published at New Solitudes

Jamie Foxx in “Django Unchained.” Image via Slate.com.

What I find surprising in the critical and personal responses I’ve heard to Django Unchained is the unwillingness to discuss what notions of race the film traffics in. What is Tarantino’s vision of blackness and whiteness, and how does his aesthetic mode of borrowing from every movie he’s ever seen contribute to his notion of race, cultural difference, and racism?

The feud between Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee is one point of entry for discussing Django Unchained. Lee refuses to see the film, arguing that “American slavery was not a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. It was a holocaust. My ancestors are slaves. Stolen from Africa. I will honor them.”

At the heart of Lee’s critique, and much of the debate over Django Unchained are the questions of historical appropriation–who has the right to tell particular stories–and the question of realism. The latter question really asks, how can we tell particular stories? Is it disrespectful, irresponsible, or racist to depict slavery as a spaghetti western or in an unreal fashion?

I find it interesting that the question of race and the representation of racial difference always seems to gravitate around notions of realism. First of all, these forms of representation are haunted by the question of whether race itself is real. If we agree that race is not, of course, a scientific reality, then what is it? Secondly, what forms of cultural representation can do justice to the very real historical and contemporary practices of racism without affirming race itself as somehow real?

This is a particularly prescient problem given what appears to be a new mutability of both notions of race and racism.

I suggest that Django Unchained is haunted by this paradox of racial realism: it wants to assert the reality of racism but slides into the trap of representing race itself as real and not a series of cultural and discursive practices that emerge in response to racist practice. I find it interesting that this paradox of racism seems to haunt avant garde and postmodern cultural production–this is perhaps spurred on by postmodernism’s own anxieties about an already ephemeral realism. Steve Reich’s “Come Out” seems to grapple with the same problems.

Ralph Bakshi’s Coonskin contains many of the same contradictions and tensions as Django Unchained and offers an early instance of a white writer-director struggling with representing the contradictions of race within a postmodern mode of representation. Coonskin attracted much of the same criticism as Django, particularly as a white director represented/parodied/satirized the reality of blackness in America:

Harlem … Harlem … Harlem

Al Sharpton and other members of CORE protested the film’s release, arguing that it was a racist depiction of blackness that trotted out all the old stereotypes of black people under the guise of irony and pastiche. Elaine Parker explained that Coonskin “depicts us as slaves, hustlers, and whores.”

In a strange twist of racial ventriloquism, Bakshi wrote the opening song for Coonskin and the film begins with Scatman Crothers performing the song. The song is a toothless attempt to parody the very stereotypes that it ends up enforcing:

I’m a minstrel man

The cleaning man

The poor man

The shoeshine man

I’m a nigger man

Watch me dance

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