The Plantation is Burning: Queer Melancholies, Violent Intimacies, and Plantation Camp in Django Unchained

This essay works through contemporary articulations of queer melancholy over the ungrieved (white) loss of (black) labor in Quentin Tarantino's 2012 film Django Unchained. Using scholars such as Butler, Sedgwick, and Babuscio, the author posits that Tarantino's aesthetic traffics in a "queer camp" that purposefully engages a cultural/historical model of plantation structure to enact a personal revenge for the film's hero that, ultimately—and naively—invites the audience to imagine a post-racial American fantasy. Reading the last image of the film, the slow-burning of the plantation of Candyland, the author asks questions about what such a final image suggests for both Tarantino's audience and his characters, including, "Who owns intimacy? Who owns revenge? And where does an intimacy of voyeurism work in an erotics of violence? What is the color of American justice, and how does it value change depending on region?" The essay ends with a call to reframe the burning plantation imaginary into a site where those marginalized by a politics/erotics of the plantation South write/talk back against their peripheralization and remake the image into a space of revolution and radicalization.