Haunted Past/Impossible Future: The South in African American Gothic

When people conceptualize the South, it is typically as a region overly determined and trapped within history: it signifies interracial violence, intra-racial conflict and betrayal, economic dependence upon racial oppression, economic stagnation, and national conflict. The South thus becomes the site of conflicts which must be emphatically marked as past; conflicts which, when they rear their ugly heads in the present, must be repressed as exceptional, the spawn of a peculiar, monstrous region.

In both African American and American Literature, the South forever recedes into the past, is presented as a ghoul which mars our present, and a region which thus must be banished from the glorious future. The South is both perpetually haunted and perpetually haunts. Consequently, in narratives fantasizing about the bright (utopian) future, there is little space to reclaim the South, to re-envision it as a region capable of producing redemptive narratives and communities of racial equality and unity. Implicit in this inability to imagine a place for the South in the future is an inability to confront, grapple with, and resolve histories of inter- and intra-racial violence within our contemporary narratives of racial progressivity. As the abjected location of such repressed history, the South becomes the locale of shudders and screams, the ghost whose wails threatens to disrupt our bright narrative of the hopeful future.

Maisha Wester is an associate professor in the African American & African Diaspora Studies Department at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She has contributed chapters to anthologies such as The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic, and the Companion to the American Gothic, while her essays have appeared in journals such as Film International, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Reconstruction. Her primary research interests are African American gothic literature and horror films.