Haunted Houses of the Black Atlantic

FAIN: FT-291367-23

Diana Adesola Mafe
Denison University (Granville, OH 43023-1100)

Writing a book on how Black writers and artists have represented haunted houses across the last three centuries. 

This project is the first book-length study of the relationship between black people and haunted houses. I consider how black writers and artists have imagined and engaged with these sites, often as a means of subverting expectations of what constitutes a terrifying place. Gothic iconography, especially the haunted house, carries a different symbolic weight in black imaginaries. The theorist Paul Gilroy uses the image of “ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean” as an organizing symbol for the black Atlantic. For my book, it is the haunted house that serves as a central motif in this cultural and geographic setting. I argue that this symbol can also be traced and traversed across time, space, genre, and medium, from slave narratives and early travel writing to contemporary literature, cinema, and popular culture. There are no monographs that illuminate this pattern of haunted houses in the black Atlantic. This book makes that contribution.