Race and the Gothic

In this graduate seminar, we muse on the aesthetic, formal, and thematic relationship between race and gothic literature and film, as well as theories of the gothic. Motifs that crowd the novels and films we explore include: death, the racialized Other, the repressed reaches of the inner self, the void, terror, encounters with alterity, shadows, blackness, nightmares, candlelit cavernous hallways, crumbling stone ruins, cliffs and crashing water, weeping willows along a dirt road, and more. We approach these motifs in prose narratives by writers such as Octavia Butler, Alejo Carpentier, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as through various visual treatments in film, television, and dance.