The Quotable Black Scholar: Stephane Dunn on *Django Unchained* (Spoiler Alert)

Professor Stephane Dunn

(Source: Cinema, Television, and Emerging Media Studies, Morehouse College)

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It is not enough that Django is allowed to get “dirty” in order to rescue his lady. Django has more responsibility because his is an epic situation and there are other slaves, indeed a whole system of slavery. Quite frankly, Django needs to do more than get payback on ‘Monsieur Candie and his cohorts. He also needs to care about the other slaves and whether others are left behind and function as a call to revolution. Whether he can save or free them all is beside the point. He has to care and he has to try or what’s the point of a fertile, creative mind like Tarantino that thrives on the fantastical? How could he fail to strike a blow at the system itself and dare to show Django exercise more compassion for a white boy witnessing his killer father get murdered than he does another branded, humiliated black man get torn by blood hounds?

–Stephane Dunn in “Django: A Baadassss Film for the Ages?”

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Biographical Notes: Stephane Dunn is Assistant Professor of English and the Co-Directory of Cinema, Television, and Emerging Media Studies at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. She holds a B.A. from the University of Evansville and she earned an M.A. in English, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (U of Illinois Press, 2008). Her articles and essays have appeared in Ms. magazine, Screening Noir, The Chronicle of Higher Education, TheRoot.com, AJC, CNN.com, the Best African American Essays(2009), and other periodicals and collections.