Afrohorror: Racial terror & the Horror genre in African American culture of the 21st century

In his remark that ‘for the horrors’ of Black American life there had been ‘almost no language’, James Baldwin identified that the reality of racial terror creates a catastrophe for artistic expression. In this thesis I propose that Afrohorror, as an aesthetic response to ongoing racial injustice in the US of the Black Lives Matter era, occupies the space of tension between “real, everyday horror” and “Horror fiction” to express the impossibility of articulating antiblack terror in art.

The thesis examines five filmic and literary Afrohorror narratives: Jordan Peele’s feature film Get Out (2017), Mat Johnson’s novel Pym (2011), Nuotama Francis Bodomo’s short film Everybody Dies! (2016), Donald Glover’s music video This is America (2018), and LaTanya McQueen’s novel When the Reckoning Comes (2021). Each of these texts depicts racial terror by adopting the conventions of the popular art genre of Horror. I identify the Afrohorror trend as part of an African American artistic/literary/cinematic tradition in which Horror has provided an imperfect, incomplete, but nonetheless persistent response to the difficulty of expressing the reality of racial terror. Placing these texts into dialogue with Afropessimist theory, I emphasise that they self-consciously and subversively employ familiar Horror tropes in attempts to tell “impossible stories” of Black American life/death in the 21st century.