African American Gothic

This new critique of contemporary African-American fiction explores its intersections with and critiques of the Gothic genre. Wester reveals the myriad ways writers manipulate the genre to critique the gothic's traditional racial ideologies and the mechanisms that were appropriated and re-articulated as a useful vehicle for the enunciation of the peculiar terrors and complexities of black existence in America. Re-reading major African American literary texts such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Of One Blood, Cane, Invisible Man, and Corregidora African American Gothic investigates texts from each major era in African American Culture to show how the gothic has consistently circulated throughout the African American literary canon.

PART I: EARLY EXPRESSIONS OF BLACK GOTHIC Haunted Lands and Gothic Voices: Slave Narrative Re-writings of Gothic Motifs Babo Speaks Back: White Violence, Black Resistance in Nineteenth Century Black Fiction 'The Dark Sunshine Aboveground': Questions of Progress and Migration in Ellison and Toomer PART II: BLACK GOTHIC AT MILLENIUM'S END 'What, after all, am I': The Terrors of (Collective) Identity 'Murdered By Piece-meal': The Destruction of African American Family in Beloved The Lost Voices of Tims Creek: Narrative Re-inscription in A Visitation of Spirits and 'Let the Dead Bury Their Dead'