Contribution by Sofia Daireaux
DJANGO UNCHAINED AND THE SCIENCE OF PHRENOLOGY
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The movie “Django Unchained” from Quentin Tarantino, takes place in Texas, 1858. In this film, Django (actor: Jamie Foxx), a black slave is promised his freedom by the German bounty hunter King Schultz (actor: Christoph Waltz), if he helps him find his own slaveowners in order to kill them. After achieving this, Django becomes a free slave and Schultz, feeling he owes something to him, accepts to help him rescue his wife, Broomhilda (actress: Kerry Washington), who’s working on “Candyland”. This enormous plantation belongs to Calvin Candie (actor: Leonardo DiCaprio), a slaveholder who also enjoys watching “Mandingo fights”, in which slaves are forced to fight to death.
In this scene, Candie introduces his guests to the skull of Old Ben, a slave who had worked in his family for a long time. He says that he’s been his whole life surrounded by “black faeces” and that he’s always asked himself the same question: “Why don’t they kill us?” Candie uses the science of phrenology in order to justify and “understand the separation of their species”. He shows that in the skull of blacks the area associated with “submissiveness” and “servility” is larger than any other human beings' skulls. On the other hand, he says that the skull of white men has more developed the area associated with creativity.
This topic has to do with the pro slavery theories developed by southerners in order to justify slavery. They tried to give scientific arguments for this institution, such as the “science” of phrenology which gave physical evidence of the blacks’ inferiority.
In fact there was a doctor from Kentucky, Charles Caldwell who “deployed phrenology in almost exactly the same manner as the fictional Candie. In 1837 he wrote to a friend claiming that "tameableness" explained the apparent ease with which Africans could be enslaved. This was a standard phrenological argument. Areas located towards the top and back of the skull, such as "Veneration" and "Cautiousness", were routinely claimed to be large in Africans.” (James Poskett. “Django Unchained and the racist science of phrenology”. The Guardian, Tuesday 5 February, 2013.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2013/feb/05/django-unchained-racist-science-phrenology
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