Black monsters and horrified Americans: A study of representations of embodied horror in twentieth-century African-American culture.

摘要

Black Monsters and Horrified-Americans examines the ways in which notions of monstrosity have been theorized and represented in twentieth-century African-American culture. Specifically, it is argued in this study that the black monsters engendered by twentieth-century African-American culture function as embodiments of the evils of “whiteness” in black skin. Black monsters, in other words, represent African-Americans who have internalized the myth of white superiority and black inferiority. These monsters, however, are not representations that seek to establish racially essentialist binaries (e.g., every thing-black-is-good/everything-white-is-evil). Instead, a study of these black monsters reveals that, as Judith Halberstam notes, “Fear and monstrosity are historically specific forms rather than psychological universals.” Indeed, the relative omission of how fear and monstrosity are imagined within African-American culture by scholars of American horror implies that the European-American imagination is universal for the United States and its production and consumption of horror. Thus, what is at stake in a study of the black monsters engendered by African-American culture is rejecting the presumption held by much of the scholarship on American horror—that the horrified-American, one who embodies an Americanness that will be lost if the monster continues to roam within the nation, is exclusively white. Indeed, the racialization of the horrified-American as white not only ignores the diversity of American culture, but it also perpetuates the production and consumption of what Elizabeth Alexander refers to as “black bodies in pain”—that is, the beaten, tortured, and mutilated bodies of African-Americans that result from white fear of black upward mobility.