UC Riverside

My dissertation explores the burgeoning field of AfroHorror as a cathartic tool that cracks open past and present experiences of trauma in order to contemplate avenues of resistance to the legacy of White supremacy and late capitalist logic while offering therapeutic alterity. Rather than thinking of the genres of AfroHorror and AfroSurrealism as only a sort of indulgent trauma porn created for the entertainment of white audiences that causes Black people to rehash painful experiences where Black people are often subject to torture, Black creatives engage Horror as what I see a “working through” space that challenges the material conditions that create the monsters and boogeymen or expose the monstrosity of “civilized society.”By drawing from speculative approaches to history inspired by Black studies scholars like Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, and others, my project attempts to think through horror fiction to confront the ills of racial and class violence experienced by descendants of Africa. I draw upon utopian theories like critical utopian analysis and utopian praxis to extend utopian conversations to rethink the rich foundations of AfroHorror. I argue that various projects that fall under the genre of AfroHorror and AfroHorror aesthetics operate in the liminal space of the “no place” while questioning the authority of the “good place” that is found in the etymology of the word “utopia”; this line of questioning is deeply decolonial and necessarily contends with the premise that utopian-inspired thinking has gained a reputation as being anti-realist, and problematic in a number of ways. Western notions of “new worlds” historically have justified the subjugation, forced displacement, and annihilation of black and brown populations for centuries. Through the critical utopian mode, marginalized people can reevaluate and subvert the mainstream, thereby developing new possibilities within the utopian impulse. For my project, I offer AfroHorror as a site of showing the ugly, the terrifying, the melancholic realities of Black subjectivities and the inspiring ways in which the paranormal allows Black people to live beyond the pain, to face the atrocities head-on, to pause, to erase, to destroy the timeline in which white supremacy gorges upon the lives of Black folk.