A meager two days after the release of the (in)famous NAS Report, I settled into a seat towards the back of Smith Auditorium to watch Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.” The film—second of Tarantino’s revenge fantasies—follows the adventures of a slave-turned-bounty hunter, who is seeking to find and recover his wife after the two of them were sold to separate plantation owners at a Greenville slave auction.
Most of the film—in my own opinion at least—addresses a single, pointed issue: the issue of black masculinity in America. It did so by meditating on stereotypes of black physicality. At one point, a suggestion is made to call a certain slave-fighter “Black Hercules.” Certainly, the film’s overall plot—Django’s (Jaime Foxx) quest to find his wife—offers abundant references to contemporary prejudices and realities of black family life. Another riveting aspect of the movie—Samuel Jackson’s unsettling performance as the consummate “Uncle Tom”—forces us to think about slavery’s legacy of African-American powerlessness. And, finally, there is a blood-chilling scene where Django is nearly emasculated (literally) before a fateful interruption.
Once again, I contend that the central theme of the film is black masculinity. What intrigues me about this inference, however, is the fact that a mere three years ago I would not have had the requisite vocabulary to come to this conclusion. I would have been bereft of the discussions and the coursework and the ruminations that give the idea of “black masculinity” any substantive meaning for me today. It is this broadening of my interests, my sensitivity and my ability to ask questions that I believe forms one pole of Bowdoin’s academic offerings.
This element of Bowdoin demands from students the ability to respond confidently to what are often dangerous and seemingly subversive questions. An example of such a question, provoked directly from this film, might be, “What is America to do, and be, in light of its legacy of slavery?” To ask this question presupposes no political affiliation, only a commitment to freely inquiring as to the true nature and possibility of justice.
Though I am not a history, Africana studies, or gender and women’s studies major, the presence and constitution of these programs on our campus (and that I have taken courses in these disciplines) is what allows me to investigate this question in contemporary art, media and politics. I believe this to be a fact, despite what the National Association of Scholars might say to the contrary.
And yet, my engagement with this discussion is incomplete without an additional element to my education at Bowdoin. This other component could be called “engagement with the history of the Western thought.”
Bowdoin is a tremendous school and my four years here have probably been the best of my life. But, Bowdoin does have some problems with its curriculum and, while the NAS report is a blunderous attempt at sniffing them out, it got too close for us not to notice.
Our curriculum does not demand that every student engage, in some general manner, with the history of intellectual thought—whether that consists in political theory, philosophy, literature, history or language study is of no concern to me.
What concerns me is the extraordinary academic distance that we can maintain from our peers. What concerns me is that while Bowdoin does a tremendous job of nurturing our aptitude for engaging with very pressing questions about identity, it does not fully commit to our immersion in history’s political, ethical and theological discussions. I cite simply the fact that there are two political theory professors at this entire school. We must come to grips with the fact that while many students do read a smattering of the great books, we are left almost entirely to our own devices when it comes to providing a structure for our educational endeavors.
The reason why I insist on the fundamental importance of the canon is not due to a kind of conservative nostalgia or the desire to trumpet “what’s ours as Americans or Westerners;” the reason is simply because our most pressing cultural debates—those about discrimination and immigration, gun violence and conservation, drone strikes and education—can only be had intelligently when we can account for the theoretical building blocks that constitute our world and our way of life. Thus arises the need to philosophically understand how we got here.
Simply put, a general education (with some core classes and books) will deepen and enliven our voyages onto the new scholarly turf that is being traversed by many Bowdoin professors. Django and Plato should not be treated as oil and water. On the contrary, they would mix quite splendidly if only we gave the bottle a little more vigorous of a shake.