Module description
This module will explore the viability of the Afro-Gothic as a distinctive sub-genre of the postcolonial Gothic. We will seek to answer the question ‘What is the Afro-Gothic?’ through a historicization of the concept Gothic in relation to narratives about, and by, continental and diasporic Africans. In the postcolonial Gothic, the classic tropes of the Gothic—incarceration within labyrinthine structures, tyrannical patriarchs, histories of hidden brutalities, suppressed and deadly secrets, haunting by the past oppressed and abused, and appearances of ghosts and other un-dead figures—are appropriated to exposes legacies of colonial trauma. Our more focused inquiry stems from the peculiar racialization of the Gothic during the nineteenth century, when Gothic darkness became increasingly associated with African blackness. In English literature in this period, the most extreme negative terms of the Gothic’s dichotomies— black/white, evil/good, Godless/Godly, savage/civilized—were mapped onto the figure of the black African.
Our exploration of the Gothic in relation to Africanness will begin by historicizing this racialized representation, both in the British and American literary traditions. We will then examine how some writers of African descent expose the racist assumptions that shore up the Gothic, and how others flip the Gothic's dichotomies, revealing Gothic’s darkness to be rooted in colonial-Imperial domination; and its present-day psychic horrors, to extend from a series of racialized incarcerations, both physical and mental. In tracing the racialized Gothic from Europe to America, the Caribbean and Africa and back to the UK, we will continually look to how gender and sexuality is implicated in these Gothic representations. Ultimately, the course seeks to learn if the Africanist appropriations of the Gothic might exhibit a common and united, possibly Pan-Africanist, literary mode of ‘haunting back’ (Teresa A. Goddu).
Assessment details
5 x 200-word reading responses (15%) and 1 x 3000 word essay (85%)
Educational aims & objectives
Students will explore the historical racialization of Gothic expression and the responding Africanist appropriation of the Gothic mode across a range of texts (travel narrative, diary entries, poetry, novels, theatre, graphic novel, popular fiction, film), time periods (Victorian to contemporary), and geographical
contexts (Britain, America, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa). The module seeks to emphasize how identity constructs are constituted aesthetically, in this case, through racialized notions of blackness/Blackness. It also draws attention to the relationships of power that inhere in the narrative conventions of a genre such as the Gothic and to how authorial manipulations of such conventions work toward disrupting ruinous power relations.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this module, students will be able to:
- Articulate how the Gothic has been racialized in both canonical and popular narrative forms.
- Exhibit a historicized understanding of how a literary genre such as the Gothic can accrue various politicized charges in distinctive socio-historical contexts.
- Be conversant in various theoretical concepts as they relate to the Gothic in postcolonial and Africanist contexts, such as the uncanny (Freud), the abject (Kristeva), the phobogenic object (Fanon), and double consciousness (DuBois).
- Demonstrate an understanding of the transgressive nature of the Gothic and how the genre’s inherent will to exceed its own bounds makes it highly amenable to imaginative explorations
Teaching pattern
One 2-hour seminar, weekly
Suggested reading list
- Richard Wright, Native Son
- Toni Morrison, Beloved
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus
- Mohale Mashigho, Intruders