A Spaghetti Southern: Landscapes of Fear in Django Unchained

Abstract

Years ago, in The Return of the Vanishing American, Leslie Fiedler explored what he saw as the re-emergence of the American Indian as a central character in literary writing. His title may have referred back to the wistful construction of native Americans as a vanishing race, most poignantly in Edward S. Curtis’s photograph, captioned “The vanishing race,” a photograph of a small group of Indians riding off into the dark, as if in a film’s closing shot. But, as Fiedler reminded his readers, the news of the Indians’ demise had been greatly exaggerated. They had returned to a number of fields of artistic imagination, in literature, in film, and more often than ever before as agents of their own representation. Never mind that their return could come in many guises—and Fiedler recognized American Indian agency in the shape of the modern hipster, blurring the features of the returnee—it did not prevent Fiedler from suggesting the field for their return as constituting one reservoir for American mythology alongside three others. He saw four main regional varieties in the American literary imagination; next to the Western—crucially to do with the encounter between American Indians and white settlers—he distinguished the Southern, the Northern and the Eastern. Obvious examples come to mind, such as Faulkner’s imaginary South or New England as imagined by Nathaniel Hawthorne. If they are separate genres, with their characteristic narrative tropes and typical heroes, we should guard against setting the categories too neatly apart.