African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places by Maisha L. Wester (review)

Begun initially as a British tradition in the eighteenth century, gothic literature quickly became a useful vehicle with which American writers could describe the conditions and challenges of their developing country. While the American uses of what were initially British tropes and conventions were met, by and large, with little opposition, the adoption of these techniques by black American writers has not always been welcomed. That a strict dividing line should exist between British gothic literature and the technique that American authors were using was and still is a position held by many critics and authors, black and white alike. Many authors and critics shun the gothic label because of the negative and demeaning connotations that have been associated with the word almost from its inception. The author Alice Walker, for one, rejects the classification of “the gothic” to describe her work because she feels that the category connotes the supernatural, while her work is grounded in the real. However, in Maisha L. Wester’s study of the African American use of gothic, African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places, a convincing case is made for the appropriateness of African American authors using the gothic genre as a way to portray black life. Wester refutes the arguments of those who disagree with this literary appropriation, explaining that this borrowing is in fact almost necessary, as “both black experience and the elaboration of that experience are complex projects requiring recourse to and engagement with genres and forms outside of the traditions unique to and extending from African tradition” (29).

Literary critics before Wester have examined African American authors’ and African American culture’s relationship and contributions to gothic literature, either in full-length studies or in book chapters or journal articles. Most notably, Toni Morrison’s 1993 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, while not explicitly about the connection between the gothic and African American culture, does address the presence—or more to her point, the absence—of African Americanness in the literature of such early American gothic authors as Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe.

Prior to the 1990s—perhaps the foundational decade in the study of African American gothic literature, due in no small part to the publication of Toni Morrison’s Beloved in 1987—others had written about the connection between race and the American gothic genre as well. Most significantly perhaps, Leslie Fiedler, in his 1960 study Love and Death in the American Novel, argues that the early American novel is gothic in its nature due to the images that populate these texts, particularly the national concerns regarding the nation’s ambiguous relationship with the Negro. A little more than a decade later, Theodore Gross in The Heroic Ideal in American Literature argues that it will be the “Negro writers, because of the conditions of their life and the memories of their ancestors’ lives, [who] will continue in the Gothic tradition.” Until Maisha Wester’s African American Gothic, however, no text had been solely focused on African American gothic writers.

In her study, Wester highlights several African American authors who have utilized gothic devices in their works. Additionally, Wester criticizes the misuse of African American culture in gothic texts by white authors. The often contradictory relationship that Wester sees between African American subjects and the gothic genre is reflected in the subtitle of her text. As Wester explains, “From Shadowed Places” is both the title of Richard Matheson’s 1960 short story, and a line from Countée Cullen’s 1925 poem “Pagan Prayer,” with which Matheson concludes his story. The short story is about a recently engaged racist who is cursed by an African witch doctor, only to be cured after having sex with a female witch doctor. In the poem, Cullen addresses the issue of God failing to hear the prayers of African Americans. In the first stanza, the protagonist says:

Not for myself I make this prayer, But for this race of mine...