Black Horror Fiction
and the Nightmare of Race
AAAD 299 Section
35204
Second Eight weeks
T/TH 5:45-8pm
Professor Maisha
Wester
Ever read a
Stephen King novel or watch one of his movies and wonder why it is that there’s
always an Indian Burial ground connected to the haunting and violence? Ever wonder why so many monsters in horror
literature are described in terms of blackness, if they aren’t straight out
black? This course seeks to interrogate
the ways African Americans have been represented as monstrous in American
horror literature. Indeed, given the
ways this trend has been adopted by horror film, and thus receives a wider
audience, such interrogations prove vital for understanding the ways racist
articulation has persisted unquestioned throughout popular culture.
More importantly,
this course looks at the ways African American writers have written back to and
against these metaphorizations of their bodies by re-writing horror
fiction. We will ask, what is horror for
the black body which has been deemed, in American literature, the very source
of terror? How do African Americans
appropriate a genre which has imprisoned them as monstrous without re-asserting
those tropes? As such, this course will
look at early and contemporary horror literature by white authors such as H.P.
Lovecraft, popular American film such as Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, and of course African American horror
literature and film, such as Brandon Massey’s Dark Corner and Snoop Dogg’s Hood
of Horrors.
Possible texts and films:
Dark
Corner by Brandon Massey
Ghost
Summer by Tananerive Due
A
Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan
Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Stories by H.P. Lovecraft
I
Walked with a Zombie (1932)
Blacula
(1972)
Candyman
(1992)
Bag
of Bones (2011)
