Leila Taylor

Leila Taylor takes us into the dark heart of the American gothic, analysing the ways it relates to race in America in the twenty-first century. Haunted houses, bitter revenants and muffled heartbeats under floorboards -- the American gothic is a macabre tale based on a true story. Part memoir and part cultural critique, Darkly: Blackness and America's Gothic Soul explores American culture's inevitable gothicity in the traces left from chattel slavery. The persistence of white supremacy and the ubiquity of Black death feeds a national culture of terror and a perpetual undercurrent of mourning. If the gothic narrative is metabolized fear, if the goth aesthetic is romanticized melancholy, what does that look and sound like in Black America?

Black History and America's Gothic Soul

Darkly

Sabrina D. 

Goth (or punk or any other subculture outside of the mainstream) exists both inside and outside of society. Goth kids wouldn’t be weird if there weren’t any normal kids to compare them to. Blackness is the same —it wouldn’t exist without non-Blackness to compare it to. Both goth and Blackness are performative identities with foundations in transgression, a familiarity with death and aestheticized mourning, and a keen awareness of the darker side of human nature.

America is unreasonably comfortable with being afraid, to the point of doomsday prepping, gun-clinging pride. The use of fear as a political tactic has been a consistent part of the American story from The Birth of a Nation to President Donald Trump’s absurd vision of a wall between us and Mexico. The strategic use of the fear of Black and brown people infiltrating and contaminating whiteness, cleverly positions the oppressor as being the oppressed, the violator as the victim. It’s quite a trick. The use of terror as a technology of repression is one wrought with contradictions because it requires the powerful to seem weak. What would those at the top of the food chain have to tremble about? The non-person: the wild animal, the creature, the monster, the mysterious other.

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