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1 results

  • 1 - Slavery

  • from Part I - Histories
  • Edited by Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, Mark Storey, University of Warwick
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to American Horror
    Published online:
    21 July 2022
    Print publication:
    04 August 2022, pp 15-28

  • Summary

    Modern Black horror literature and film depict the complex mechanisms of social death threatening contemporary African Americans. Drawing on slavery to metaphorize social death, texts like Linden Hills and Stigmata, films such as The House Invictus and popular media like Lovecraft Country and “This Is America” also reveal how the lure of the American Dream seduces African Americans into colluding in their own suffering and the suffering of others like them. Yet even as slavery is presented as a point of historical horror, it is also presented as a source of ancestral knowledge, as African American artists rewrite the history of Black slave resistance to urge modern audiences to a much needed and long-overdue revolution.