Plantation Spaces and the Black Body: Quentin Tarantino s Django Unchained as Maroon Narrative

Abstract

This article reads Django Unchained as a maroon narrative. It argues that the film s spatial poetics critique the American symbolic landscapes of the West and the South as well as their cinematic representation. The analysis examines the depiction of the black body and the blending of Western and Southern spaces in an American business master narrative. In this setup, Tarantino s self-made black cowboy figure is not heroic but remains a cipher in both epistemologies. Django acts as a ghost who haunts the plantation and the frontier in a series of masquerades, thus pointing to the pitfalls of cinema history and national myth-making.