A máscara do poder: um estudo sobre o discurso de Stephen em Django Livre

Abstract

This study investigates cinema as a discursive practice and a technology of power, focusing on the film Django Unchained (2012), directed by Quentin Tarantino. Specifically, it analyzes the discourse of Stephen (portrayed by Samuel L. Jackson) through the lens of Foucault’s Discourse Analysis. The primary objective is to analyze power and its decentralities as produced by the discursive practices of Stephen, the Black house-slave and foreman of the Candyland plantation, observing how his subjectivity is constructed to legitimize the maintenance of the slave system. The specific objectives include: identifying the linguistic and rhetorical resources employed by the character; understanding how his discourse contributes to the represented racial hierarchy; examining the articulation between subject, discourse, and power; and relating these discursive practices to Foucault's critique of discursive formations. The methodology is qualitative and interpretative, with an archeo-genealogical orientation based on the concepts of subject, discourse, and power developed by Foucault (2008, 2013). The research also engages with authors such as Hall (2003), hooks (1992), Carneiro (2023), Mbembe (2018), and Mills (1997). The methodological path involved three main stages: a filmic analysis of Django Unchained and a critical reading of its script, highlighting Stephen's lines, gestures, and contexts of enunciation; a bibliographic survey on subject, discourse, racism, and representation; and the categorization of observed discursive strategies, considering linguistic resources, effects of meaning, and power relations updated within the narrative. The study allows for the inference that Stephen is constructed as a paradoxical subject: although Black and formally subordinated, he exercises disciplinary authority over other enslaved people, internalizing and reproducing the codes of white supremacy. However, the analysis highlights that despite managing, monitoring, and articulating the functioning of the slave system, he does not hold the sovereign power of violence, which remains concentrated in the hands of white subjects. His position reveals the ambivalence of a subjectivity crossed by the colonial split: while discursively adhering to the dominant order, his authority is delegated and conditional, proving that decision-making power and the capacity to exercise violence remain structurally racialized. The analysis shows that his language combines deference and surveillance, mobilizing arguments that legitimize his loyalty to the master and his hostility toward his own race. This discursive performance illustrates the technologies of subjection described by Foucault and the device of raciality pointed out by Sueli Carneiro: power practices that capture the Black body and functionalize it for the maintenance of the colonial order. As a result, the research demonstrates that cinema, by representing characters like Stephen, not only revisits the slave past but also reinscribes contemporary racial discourses, showing how collaboration and racial hierarchy are produced within structures where power remains white. It is concluded that Stephen's filmic discourse operates as a synthesis of colonial contradictions: he is simultaneously a product of structural violence and an operator of its reproduction, even if he is not its sovereign agent. Thus, the analysis reinforces the importance of understanding cinema as a political-discursive field in which meanings, subjectivities, and regimes of truth about race and power are contested.