Black Horror and Haunting in Literature and Film

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Since the release of Jordan Peele’s landmark 2017 film Get Out, Black horror has been catapulted to the fore of the American cultural imagination. From Lovecraft Country to Antebellum to adaptations of Candyman and Interview With the Vampire, contemporary depictions of the Black horrific continue to revise and reorient the horror genre. Black horror distinguishes itself by turning the horror genre away from white anxieties about an ominous and ephemeral Other and towards an examination of the horrifying qualities of everyday Black Life.

The horrific and the haunting have been at the crux of Black social life since America’s founding, but what might Black horror teach us about empire, about crises, about fear and its alternatives? How does the anti-Black violence which underpins American empire haunt contemporary depictions of Black life in the horror genre and in the literary canon? And finally, what does the contemporary renaissance of Black horror tell us about the ongoing catastrophe of our world? This panel explores Black horror in American visual and textual cultures, stitching together the speculative and the quotidian to analyze the horror genre’s relationship to empire. From the new to the historical—the national to the transatlantic—this panel analyzes the monstrous and the ghostly, the vampiric and the mad in Black literature and cinema.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Candyman and the Afterlives of Slavery - Julia Mollenthiel

• Haunting as Modality: The Black Feminist Spectral Possibility of Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood - Sarah Buckner, University of Missouri

• “It’s Not Supernatural”: Racial Hauntings in Mariama Diallo’s Master (2022) - Kay R. Barrett, Stanford

• The Monster Mash Remix: Bomani J. Story’s The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster - Tashima Thomas, Southern Methodist University

• Black Migration, Racism, Survivor’s Guilt, and Horror in the movie His House - Sanchita Sardar, Manav Rachna International Institute of Research and Studies

Chair

• Alisha Gaines, University of Virginia-Main Campus

Biographical Information

Dr. Julia Mollenthiel is an assistant professor at the University of Florida where she teaches interdisciplinary courses on Black Horror and Afrofuturism. Dr. Mollenthiel is interested in the Black horror aesthetic, and the affordances of horror as it relates to some of the larger goals of Black Studies. Her work has appeared in Black Camera and Popular Culture Review.

Sarah Buckner is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri where she teaches African Diasporic and Queer literature. She received her PhD from the University of California, Riverside in 2021. Sarah is at work on her first manuscript, Exposed Flesh: A Literary History of Black Being, which centers Black women writers and thinkers like Mary Prince, Jamaica Kincaid, Frances Harper, and Gwendolyn Brooks to argue that the vulnerability of Black being shapes consciousness. Through the lens of exposure, Sarah’s work uses a Black feminist methodology to explore the kinds of sensational and experiential knowledge systems which arise from Black encounters of and with the world but are often erased through white supremacy. Her work is forthcoming in MELUS journal.

Kay R. Barrett is a doctoral candidate in the English Department of Stanford University specializing in African American and Black Diaspora literature and media. She holds two Master’s degrees, one in 19th-century English literature from the University of Oxford and another in intermediality from the University of Edinburgh. Her current dissertation project examines Black speculative narratives through the lens of Black feminist theoretical and aesthetic frameworks. Analyzing artists like Janelle Monáe, NK Jemisin, and Rivers Solomon, she interrogates how Black women and/or queer artists repurpose tropes of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror to both illuminate the raced, gendered ordering of our social world and construct insurgent epistemologies for building liberated futures. She has presented on her research at conferences through the American Literature Association, the Science Fiction Foundation, and the Society for the Study of the American Gothic. Her recently published article in Studies in the Novel, “Mythologies Uplifted: The New Woman of the Margins in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins and Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, reflects her first Master’s work on Irish and Black women’s writing in late 19th-century literature.


Tashima Thomas is an art historian, gastronome, curator, and cultural critic. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Art History at Southern Methodist University specializing in the art of the African Diaspora. She received her PhD in Art History from Rutgers University and focuses on food pathways, visual and material culture, racial formation, Afro-Gothic as an aesthetic and theoretical framework, and the environmental humanities. Her book manuscript Edible Extravagance: The Visual Art of Consumption in the Black Atlantic is under contract with SUNY Press, The Afro-Latinx Futures Series. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, exhibition catalogues, and edited volumes.


Sanchita Sardar is a PhD scholar in the Department of English at MRIIRS, Faridabad, India. In addition to her research, she serves as an Assistant Professor of English at the Faculty of Media Studies and Humanities (SMeH) and as a Manager in the Admissions and SFC Department at MREI. With over three years of teaching experience, Sanchita has actively contributed to academic research, presenting papers at four prestigious international conferences. Her research interests span artificial intelligence, psychology, and masculinity studies. Two of her papers, shortlisted for Scopus-indexed publications, include "Technovation and Consumer Dynamics: Bridging the Digital Transformation and Sustainable Growth through AI Anchors on DD Kisan" and "Psychological Repercussions of Racial Abuse, Trauma, and Identity Theft in Colson Whitehead’s ‘The Nickel Boys’."