White Vampires, Black Blues, and the Afro-Gothic South in Sinners
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The Gothic often functions less as a genre than as diagnostic elements, a conceptual apparatus that renders visible the violence, guilt, and contradictions that national narratives attempt to overwrite. Fiedler claims that American literature itself is “a gothic fiction.” The American ideologies of innocence, democracy, and liberalism have all hinged on racialized disavowals from the denial of slavery’s afterlives and the erasure of Indigenous dispossession to the refusal to acknowledge the persistence of racial violence even in contemporary America. The Gothic apparatus of the return of the past becomes a means of making visible the violent systems of domination that attempt to shape the present. In this sense, racial haunting becomes a mode of Black survival, memory, and futurity. This essay situates Ryan Coogler’s Sinners within the long genealogy of Southern Gothic narratives to show how the film inherits and then overturns the genre’s historical coding of racial fear and monstrosity. I discuss the juke joint not simply as a setting but as a ritual ground where blues performances produce “the break” through which Black life is articulated. I also explore the film’s use of whiteness and passing into Afro-Gothic grammar, revealing the mechanisms by which desire and predation are infiltrated. I finally turn to this film’s Afro-Gothic futurity, insisting that Sinners imagines haunting as a generative force that allows Black life to enact alternative visions of future.
Abstract
The Gothic often functions less as a genre than as diagnostic elements, a conceptual apparatus that renders visible the violence, guilt, and contradictions that national narratives attempt to overwrite. Fiedler claims that American literature itself is “a gothic fiction.” The American ideologies of innocence, democracy, and liberalism have all hinged on racialized disavowals from the denial of slavery’s afterlives and the erasure of Indigenous dispossession to the refusal to acknowledge the persistence of racial violence even in contemporary America. The Gothic apparatus of the return of the past becomes a means of making visible the violent systems of domination that attempt to shape the present. In this sense, racial haunting becomes a mode of Black survival, memory, and futurity. This essay situates Ryan Coogler’s Sinners within the long genealogy of Southern Gothic narratives to show how the film inherits and then overturns the genre’s historical coding of racial fear and monstrosity. I discuss the juke joint not simply as a setting but as a ritual ground where blues performances produce “the break” through which Black life is articulated. I also explore the film’s use of whiteness and passing into Afro-Gothic grammar, revealing the mechanisms by which desire and predation are infiltrated. I finally turn to this film’s Afro-Gothic futurity, insisting that Sinners imagines haunting as a generative force that allows Black life to enact alternative visions of future.