Darkly: Blackness and America’s Gothic Soul

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: The Black American Gothic 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?