With the popularity of Jordan Peele’s horror films Get Out and Us, as well as Misha Green’s television series Lovecraft Country, it has become increasingly important to study the ways Black writers are using genres of horror in their writing. That is, as more and more Black creatives employ horror to think about the realities of Black life, this course offers an introduction to Black Horror, that pays special attention to how this genre navigates racial, class, and other forms of difference across the 20th and 21st centuries. It is divided into four modules that aim first to introduce students to the history, terms and theories of Black horror, and then to explore how these are at work in zombie, vampire, and haunted house horror texts. At the end of this course, students will have a diasporic understanding of the relationship between race and horror in Black writing. To do this, we will read Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring and Skin Folk, Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and selected essays that will be made available on Canvas. We will also watch select episodes of Lovecraft Country as well as the films Get Out, Us, and His House

This course is diversity intensive in its focus on how writers of African descent from all over the diaspora — the Caribbean, England, West Africa, and the US — employ horror in their writing to come to terms with histories that are characterized by the violence of colonization, slavery, and imperialism. Being attentive to gender disparities in horror writing, most of our texts will be written by women, with an eye to thinking about how horror functions as a social and political literary form on matters of citizenship, race, gender, sexuality, and religion in our increasingly complicated times.

Students will be able to

(1) identify and describe the aesthetics, conventions, and major themes of horror in Black writing.

(2) explain how horror aesthetics, themes and conventions work in Black writing.

(3) produce creative project that communicates complex and original ideas about how Black writers use the horror aesthetics, themes, and conventions. 

Assignments will include response papers, a group presentation, and a final project.