The Black/Body Gothic: Exhuming and Transcending Racial Mixing, Passing, and Slavery's Afterlives in Lovecraft Country (2020)

Abstract: A Black Lives Matter‒era "new wave" of Black media has created an expansive space for exploring Black subjectivities and critiquing American racism. This includes a surge in Black horror that inverts the equation of blackness with monstrosity while showcasing Black fears and terror. This "new wave" is striking for its engagement of the gothic across different genres and subjects, beyond (Black) horror. This essay investigates this recent utilization of the gothic by Black creators—part of a "New Black Gothic"—while contextualizing it within a longer tradition of utilizing the mode to exhume and resist the racial horrors of America's past and present. Focusing on Lovecraft Country (HBO, 2020), I analyze how the series blends the Black gothic and Black horror to conjure slavery and thus critique its historical erasures, expose its ongoing legacies, and articulate Black subjectivity. Yet, Lovecraft also deploys what I theorize as a Black/body gothic that interrogates the embodied, physical horrors of race and enslavement through one character, Ruby's, gruesome transformations between Black and white bodies. Through Ruby's metamorphoses, Lovecraft gothicizes racial mixing, racial passing, and processes of racialization to both reveal and resist slavery's sexual economies and the repressed histories of miscegenation and sexual violence enacted against Black women from slavery to the present. This Black/body gothic engages the Black gothic and/as body horror to critique racial binaries and ontologies, reanimate passing's transgressive dissolution of boundaries, and ultimately enable Black women's liberating self-actualization, in defiant transcendence of slavery's haunting afterlives.