Copyright 2018. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved.

May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable
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 Searching for Sycorax

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 Searching for Sycorax

Black Women’s Hauntings of
Contemporary Horror

Kinitra D. Brooks

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

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 978-0-8135-8461-4
978-0-8135-8462-1
978-0-8135-8463-8
978-0-8135-8464-5

Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the

Library of Congress.

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available

from the British Library.

Lyrics to “Hoodoo Lady” by Memphis Minnie reprinted with permission of the

Minnie Lawlers Estate.

Copyright © 2018 by Kinitra D. Brooks

All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106
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∞ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American
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[Link]

Manufactured in the United States of America

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 For my parents
Gregory and Wanda
Thank you for so much
This book exists because of you

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 Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv

Introduction. Searching for Sycorax:

Black Women and Horror 1

. The Importance of Neglected Intersections:

Characterizations of Black Women in
Mainstream Horror Texts 16

. Black Feminism and the Struggle for

Literary Respectability 41

. Black Women Writing Fluid Fiction:

An Open Challenge to Genre Normativity 56

. Folkloric Horror: A New Way of Reading

Black Women’s Creative Horror 95

Conclusion. Sycorax’s Power of Revision:

Reconstructing Black Women’s Counternarratives 127

Appendix: Creative Work Summary 133

Notes 167

Index 195

vii

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 Preface

Though mute throughout, she’s [Grace Jones] a

powerful presence as vampire queen Katrina.
—Ian Berriman, [Link]

I can say that I can’t think of any one [black woman] that has ever
been an author or illustrator in the genre whatsoever. . . . It’ll happen
eventually, I’m sure. It’s just one of those things that hasn’t surfaced yet.
—William, attendee at the World Horror Convention 2013

I was a seven-year-old curled up in a movie theater seat watch-

ing Ms. Jones as Katrina in Vamp (1986). My fingers were curled
in anticipation on either side of my head, ready to plug my ears
in terror at any hint of surprise or film-constructed danger. I was
ensconced between my beloved aunt Errolyn—whom I had con-
vinced that I was old enough to handle horror—and my older
cousin Lee—whom I believe had more fun snickering at my
reactions to the film than actually watching the movie himself.
My eyes were glued to the (then) gargantuan screen at the Joy
Theatre in New Orleans, Louisiana—well, at least until a vampire
appeared on screen—then they were glued to the recessed lighting
in the floor. My imagination began to ponder the space behind
those lights, calculating if it was big enough for a vampire’s hand
to fit through and grab my leg. I watched the film in a semicata-
tonic state of a terror I had never felt before, hoping, wishing, and
praying that it would just END! I was so proud of myself and

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 I sighed with relief as the credits begin to roll—I had survived! And
then my aunt Errolyn tore my world asunder as she announced
that since she’d enjoyed the movie so much we were going to stick
around for the next showing! I died a little inside as I collapsed
into my seat ready to endure another round of torture, and Lee
collapsed into another round of raucous laughter at my expense.
I now recognize the genius of my aunt Errolyn and appreciate
the gift she gave me that day, the gift of an intellectual curiosity
about horror. It was the second showing that gave me the bravery
to truly look at the film, as I now had the ability to move beyond
my terror and began to enjoy the movie and become enraptured by
the dark beauty of Grace Jones.1 And though I loved Katrina, my
young mind had a strong sense that there was something wrong
with Grace Jones’s distinctive beauty ultimately being portrayed
as a horrific vampire, that her features became exaggerated and
monstrously ugly when she finally revealed her “true” self. I also
began to wonder, why the heck didn’t she talk?2 Was her character
mute? Even at seven years old I could see the need to communicate
in those eerily colored eyes in the midst of her painted face and
wondered, why didn’t they let her talk? Why was she silenced? I
would eventually learn that the word for which I was searching for
Katrina’s characterization was “problematic.”
My active little mind began to wonder if there were there
other central black female characters in horror movies that were
not painted so scarily. And, even more important, were there cool
black girl characters that kicked the monster’s butt and got the
cute guy in the end? As I grew older, my aunt Errolyn and aunt
Linda introduced me to Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie from Halloween
(1978) and Kim from Prom Night (1980) and other cool girls who
kicked butt and sometimes got a cute boyfriend in the end. Yet
I began to realize that the girl was always white. And after a
somewhat traumatic introduction to zombies revealed even more
about my growing love for horror: we black girls were absent—we
were never there!3
As I grew older, I gained a love of literature from my mother
and a love of genre fiction from my father. My lived experience

x Preface

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 Fig. 1. Grace Jones as Katrina, Vamp (1986).

as a young black woman continuously highlighted the erasure of

black women in mainstream horror. I began to ask questions as
my consumption of genre media increased in my late teens. Why
were there never any black people in Sunnydale, California? And
was I the only one who thought the Chinese slayer (Ming Qiu)
and the Afroed blaxploitation slayer (April Weeden) from the
season five episode of A Fool for Love were far more interesting
in their fleeting minutes onscreen than Buffy Anne Summers
(Sarah Michelle Gellar) had been throughout seven seasons of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003)? Did Jada Pinkett’s character,
Maureen, and Elise Neal’s Hallie both have to die in Scream 2
(1997)? And why, in my absolute favorite subgenre of horror—the
zombie apocalypse—were there never any black women in the
group of survivors? Hell, there weren’t ever any women of color—
no Puerto Ricans, no Koreans, no Chicanas, no Pakistanis—none
of the many different shades and incarnations of womanhood I
encountered on a daily basis. It was a blatant erasure that began to
seriously bother me, which then became an irritation and finally
developed into a rash for which I needed to find a healing salve in
order to save my love for horror.
I questioned if it was possible for mainstream horror to construct
complicated black women characters. In my early twenties I began

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 to see flashes of hope with the release of films such as Supernova
(2002), AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004), and 28 Days Later (2002)
and found joy in horror films’ recognition that the black girl can
survive in the end—and if she’s lucky, she gets to hang out with
The Predator along the way!4 It was as a graduate student that
I fell hard for Michonne, a kick-ass black female character in
Robert Kirkman’s ongoing comic zombie opus The Walking Dead
(2003–), and Selena, who righteously slayed the infected with her
handy machete from Danny Boyle’s kinetic homage to the zombie
apocalypse, 28 Days Later.5 Both characters were capable black
women who actively contributed to their own survival. They were
often portrayed as protectors of the group without being a piously
perfect caretaker as many black female characters in mainstream
movies are wont to be. Had mainstream horror begun to construct
complicated black women characters?
And then I watched/read both texts for a second time—and
that word, “problematic,” popped up again. The characters started
out as capable, but then often became a workhorse of the group.
The white female characters were vulnerable, protected, and even
rescued in heroic feats of grandeur by the men in the group. Why
didn’t anyone ever rescue the black woman? Why did she always
have to rescue herself ? Didn’t anyone care if she survived? And
then I came upon the rape of Michonne and got angry.6 Tears
of anger began to flow as I read each panel while Michonne was
brutally beaten and gang-raped by a rival faction of survivors. My
eyes froze on one particular panel in which Michonne is framed
against a stone wall dressed in nothing but a ripped T-shirt. Her
bruised and swollen face bespoke the sexual and physical violence
she had just endured in her nudity. The only thing that prevents
her from collapsing in a heap of trauma is that she is chained to
the wall by a pair of slave shackles trapping her wrists. That panel
represented so much pain, horror, and trauma experienced by the
black women I studied as a student of black feminist literature—
my sense of self demanded I do something.
I became transfixed on finding more complex characterizations
of black women in horror created by black women. I began by

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 diving into Tananarive Due’s African Immortals series and reveling
in complex black characters as she Africanized the European
vampire. I began rooting for the survival of the supernatural
power couple Damali Richards and Carlos Riviera as LA Banks
reworked, reimagined, and significantly improved upon the legend
of the young girl chosen to protect the world by slaying vampires.7
I still hungered for more than black women’s interpretation of
vampires; I wanted to read our takes on zombies, ghosts, and the
supernatural in religion.
The inclusion of black women in critical horror studies is
paramount because of the unique positionality of black women,
most specifically manifested in the simultaneity of oppressions
that aids in defining black women’s identities. Postmodern horror
studies’ problematic focus on questions of monstrosity regarding
white women and black men has proven detrimental to its own
saliency and relevance—the critical study of black women within
the genre is a volley against mainstream horror’s willful ignorance
of the intersections of identity that composes its audience and,
more important, its expanding pool of creators. It is important
that black women be complexly presented as both characters and
creators of the horror genre.
This project is a search and rescue mission. I aim to find the
black women in contemporary horror and critique the complex
ways in which they manifest as characters, as creators, and as rebels
to the conventions of both horror theory and black feminist theory.
This text openly defies the mistaken notion—as articulated by
William in the epigraph—that black women horror creators do
not exist or are so miniscule as to be rendered insignificant to the
genre. I make visible the black woman’s significance, relevance, and
subversion to conventional horror theories and narratives.
I end my investigation with the black woman creators’ challenge
that horror adapts or dies—as they are examples of the growing
demographic changes that the horror genre must pursue and
develop to continue its deep cultural influences.

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 Acknowledgments

I have been writing this book for the better part of a decade and
I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who brought
this moment to fruition. I would first and foremost like to thank
God, for none of this would be possible without my faith and the
protection He provides through my ancestors. I am so thankful
for my sisters, Cincia Kerr who keeps me sane and grounded
and Kelsi Brooks, who shows me how to chase my dreams. My
brother-in-law, Solanke Kerr and the best niece and nephew
a woman could ask for, Isabella Marie and Gregory Elijah. My
aunts, Clara Stansberry, Earline Brooks, and Sedonia Brooks, for
their steady guidance as well as my awesomely cool Uncle Raymond
Dunn. I would also like to thank my cousin, Sergeant First Class
Retired Leonidas Brooks for letting me share memories of our
beloved Aunt Errolyn and his mom, my Aunt Linda. And to the
rest of the Diva Trinity—We made it, Drs. Brandy Huderson and
Ashley Jackson!
I have been blessed with an amazing network of girlfriends
while here in San Antonio. These women have become my
family and have always been there for me when I dared doubt
my abilities. So thank you, Sonja Lanehart, Joycelyn Moody,
Deborah Thoma, LaGuana Gray, Rhonda Gonzales, Patricia
Francois, Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson, Kirsten Thompson, and
Kellie Hamilton Ferrier. And I also thank your partners and chil-
dren for welcoming me into their hearts and homes.
When I was at my lowest point in writing this book, I met
John Jennings who invited me to Astroblackness 2 and informally

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 inducted me into the Black Speculative Arts Movement—or did
I just bumrush and make a place for myself ? Meeting and connect-
ing with a group of black academics who were geeked out by all
things blerd gave me that final push of confidence to ascertain that
my theories had a place in the academy and were urgently needed.
Thank you for being #Squad John, Susana Morris, Stacey Robinson,
Regina Bradley, Reynaldo Anderson, and Nalo Hopkinson.
Thank you to my trove of mentors who have guided my career; I
must commend their guidance, beginning with Trudier Harris who
continues to pick up the phone whenever I need her. I would also
like to thank Gwendolyn Pough, Michele Levy, Mae G. Henderson,
and Nicholas Jones for their continued support and belief in my
potential.
I would like to thank the University of Texas at San Antonio,
particularly the support provided by the College of Liberal and
Fine Arts Faculty Development Leave program—please bring it
back. That semester of research without any teaching commitments
proved invaluable to finishing my monograph, and other professors
need that support. I am thankful for the Faculty Boot Camp at the
National Center for Faculty Development Diversity—my working
group helped me develop the discipline and rigor needed to finish
this book project. I would also like to thank the Sue E. Denman
Distinguished Chair in American Literature for welcoming me
as a postdoctoral fellow and the Brackenridge Endowed Chair in
Literature and the Humanities for continuous research support.
I received so much help from my graduate students in terms
of gathering and organizing my research. Thank you, Stepha-
nie Schoellman, for your help with the Appendix; Christopher
Guzman for helping me with the book’s visuals; and Alexis McGee,
for your dedication.
Finally, I want to thank my husband, Amadou Jallow, for being
my anchor.

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 Searching for Sycorax

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 Introduction
Searching for Sycorax
Black Women and Horror

Hast thou forgot the foul witch Sycorax . . . hast thou forgot her?
—The Tempest, Act I, Scene II

Defining the genre of horror remains an ongoing challenge, for

it is one of the few genres that depends upon the reaction of the
viewer/reader.1 Like many questions of genre, particularly con-
cerning genres not traditionally considered the High Arts, pro-
ducing a definitive taxonomic definition of horror proves quite
difficult. Contemporary horror fiction is a space in which deep-
seated human anxieties can be given free reign because we are
often defined by that which terrifies us. Our cultures and our
lives are founded upon preventing a confrontation with our ter-
rors. We create governments and prisons to civilize ourselves and
abate our fear of anarchy and mankind’s potential for savagery. We
throw money at science to ameliorate our dis-ease, with the hege-
mony operating on the assumption that science can and will solve
everything—disease, famine, war, and so forth. The Western hege-
mony loves binaries—the world is defined by what is good or evil,
living or dead, black or white, male or female. Yet postmodern hor-
ror is a world in which there is an “absolute blurring of boundaries
between good AND evil, real AND unreal. . . . Institutions are

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 questioned and the master status of the universal (read male, white,
moneyed, heterosexual) subject deteriorates.”2 Most contemporary
horror critics—including this critic—center their studies on a dif-
fering amalgamation of the horror definitions found in leading
genre theorists, such as Isabel Cristina Piñedo, Noël Carroll, and
Robin Wood. It is necessary to note that Searching for Sycorax is not
an attempt to redefine the definition of horror, but simply to refine
the projects of these genre theorists in order to present a contem-
porary definition of horror that allows for an analysis of how black
women “worry the lines” of the supposedly inclusive nature of
horror theory.3 I also aim to propagate my insistence that horror
must allow a space for black womanhood, even as it has casually
overlooked black women in its past iterations. Contemporary hor-
ror theory and black feminist literary theory can and must con-
tinue to expand and adapt to their rapidly changing audiences for
both continued survival and relevancy—for black women creators
are actively revising and redefining the genre of horror.
Isabel Cristina Piñedo makes an important contribution to
horror studies by contemporizing the genre by offering a racially
gendered critique. Piñedo outlines three characteristics of post-
modern horror that I read through Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn
of the Dead (2008). The first characteristic presents a violent disrup-
tion with the everyday world; the second characteristic portrays
a horror that transgresses and violates boundaries; and the final
characteristic questions the validity of rationalism.
Postmodern horror begins with a violent disruption with the
everyday world.4 Early in the film, Ana, the lead character, rushes
out of her house and stands in the driveway as the camera does
a slow 180-degree pan to the right. We see the devastation and
chaos: a woman in her nightgown is chased and bitten by a zom-
bie; another neighbor, this time in a priest’s collar, shoots a zombie
on his lawn and demands that Ana stays back via gunpoint. Finally,
as he crosses the street moving toward her—gun still aloft—to see
if she is human, his body suddenly crumples and careens off screen
as he is hit by an ambulance gone out of control. The viewer is
drawn to conclude that this ambulance has an attacking zombie

 Searching for Sycorax

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 inside. Ana has entered a world that privileges gore, “the explicit
dismemberment, evisceration, putrefication and myriad other
forms of boundary violations with copious amounts of blood.”5 In
a previous scene, Ana watches her husband, Luis, become a zom-
bie before our very eyes. Ana, a nurse, rescues her husband from
the zombified little girl next door, Vivian, who has bitten him in
the neck. In the bedroom, they both struggle to put pressure on the
geyser of blood that is his neck wound. Blood spews everywhere,
on Ana, Luis, and the bed, as Luis slowly succumbs to his wounds.
In shock, Ana wanders to her bedroom window, distracted by
sounds of distress. The screen shot shows Ana, clearly focused
in the foreground as her husband slowly rises to join the wake
of the undead in the blurry haze of the shot’s background. Suddenly,
there is a rack to focus upon Luis as he initiates a screaming attack
and jumps toward her. They engage, sloppily, as zombie Luis can-
not hold on to her because of the slipperiness of his own blood
smeared across her body. She escapes to the bathroom, slamming
the door shut as she crashes into the porcelain tub. These scenes
portray a thematic and visual blurring of the boundaries between
Western binaries—such as life/death, good/evil, moral/immoral,
all taking place at dawn, that special time between night and day.
This blurring leads to the second characteristic of the post-
modern horror genre—the portrayal of a horror that transgresses
and violates boundaries. The existence of a reality populated by
zombies demonstrates humanity’s anxieties about the “imper-
meability of death.”6 Zack Snyder’s rotting zombies violate the
staid boundaries between life and death, while also preying upon
our anxieties about contagion. Vivian bites Luis, even as Ana
notices something peculiar about the tween and firmly tells her
to stay back. Ana finally slams and locks the bedroom door, but
it is too late, for the contagion has already entered the sanctity of
her bedroom—through Luis’s infected bite. Throughout the film,
the viewer is reminded that the bite of the zombie is infectious
and initiates a painful (and sometimes long) transformation of
the human body into another walking rotting corpse. The zom-
bie infection plays upon contemporary fears of infectious diseases

Introduction 

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 such as Ebola, HIV/AIDS, and swine flu. The zombie infection
also plays upon the racialized nature of contagion as seen with the
racist “dog-whistles” that accompanied Western fears of swine flu
(China) and Ebola as well as HIV/AIDS (Africa).
As Piñedo contends, the final characteristic of postmodern
horror is that the genre questions the validity of rationality.7 The
science of the Western world is diminished and is often the cause
of the dangers that zombification presents to humanity. The char-
acters that survive these fictions adapt quickly, relying on human
ingenuity and intuition paired with preindustrial weapons such as
machetes, baseball bats, hammers, katanas, and revolvers. Piñedo
insists: “horror exposes the limits of rationality and compels us to
confront the irrational . . . [particularly] the disordered, ineffable,
chaotic, and unpredictable universe which constitutes the under-
side of life.”8 In this horrific world of gore, in which “the narrative is
propelled by violence,” the characterizations studied in this project
are established and analyzed.9 These characteristics relate to my
contention that even as the horror genre subverts and perverts
classic hegemonic tenets, it remains dangerously staid in its sup-
plication to weary racial and gender dynamics that constricts its
revolutionary potential for cultural repudiation.
Noël Carroll presents an incredibly thorough attempt to define
and create a philosophy of horror even as he preempts arguments
against his very definition. Carroll’s work, The Philosophy of Horror
or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990), remains a staple of critical hor-
ror theory, even over twenty years after its publication, because
he muses upon the topic of horror with sobering respect, offer-
ing a rational and deductive contemplation upon defining horror.
Carroll juxtaposes his theory, what he calls “art-horror,” against
other interpretations of horror—those associated with the horrors
people inflict upon each other—such as enslavement, rape, and war.
Art-horror is distinguished as the constructed creativity of what our
society refers to when it speaks of horror as related to books, films,
and television.10 Carroll spends much of his first chapter distin-
guishing what horror is not and craftily delineating it from its pop-
ular conflation with both the science fiction and fantasy genres.11

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 Carroll defines art-horror as an emotion of fear instigated by the
simultaneity of threat and disgust.12 The reader feels threatened
by anything that elicits fear, be it moral, physical, psychological,
social, and/or cognitive; yet Carroll is the first to acknowledge that
many things elicit fear. He insists that the important interlocutor
for art-horror occurs when that thing also joins with the disgust
elicited by impurity, something that is categorically interstitial,
incomplete, and/or formless.13 I highlight the disgust of impurity
because it recurs in my analysis of the categorical interstitiality of
black women in horror.
In defining horror, I choose to privilege Robin Wood’s defi-
nition of horror: “[It is] when Normality is threatened by The
Monster . . . [or The Other].”14 This definition works even as it
proves overly simplistic and broad. The infusion of Piñedo and
Carroll adds complexity and specificity. It is necessary to note that
all of these critics agree that horror, like most other genres, is a
textual category for discovering and developing larger societal anx-
ieties through certain themes of disquieting interstitialities often
referred to as monsters. In the end, my project is not to define
horror, which is an ongoing conversation, but to interrogate its
problematic themes of racially gendered subjects and creators—
specifically black women.
The remake of Dawn of the Dead was simultaneously critically
admired and panned. Many genre purists cringed at Zack Snyder’s
decision to use fast zombies who could run after their prey even
as other critics enjoyed the thrilling ride of an updated homage
to George Romero’s classic 1978 study of Western materialism.15
Ultimately, the film’s supporters won out over its detractors, as
the film has proven popular within the latest zombie criticisms.16
Though this remake broke from classic zombie tropes in many
ways and may even be read as a criticism of that tradition, it still
remains true to certain distinctive features typical of contempo-
rary horror, the absence of black women. The film continues the
problematic tradition of the (non)representation of certain inter-
sections of race and gender in Western film and literature. Using
multiple texts, I begin Searching for Sycorax by interrogating how

Introduction 

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 patriarchal and Eurocentric notions perpetuate multiracial repre-
sentations of men while perpetuating monoracial representations
of women in contemporary horror, underscoring the challenges
such portrayals represent for black women characters and creators.
Dawn of the Dead has some racial diversity, with not one but
two significant characters of color.17 African American actors Ving
Rhames and Mekhi Phifer depict the characters of Kenneth and
Andre, respectively. Furthermore, director Zack Snyder’s pairing
of Phifer’s Andre with Inna Korobkina’s Luda (who plays his
pregnant Russian girlfriend) can certainly be read as his enduring
statement on the progressive nature of Hollywood’s stance on the
power of love in interracial coupledom, even in the postapocalyp-
tic dystopia of zombies. Though Snyder revamps and extends the
zombie trope of the cool, calm, and collected black male survivor
and ultimate leader of the group, he fails to extend these courte-
sies of presence and complexity of characterization to women of
color.18 In the film, Snyder offers a variety of representations of
(white) womanhood ranging from competent to incompetent—
from Sarah Polley’s portrayal of the adept survivor, Ana, to Lindy
Booth’s characterization of the useless sexual distraction, Nicole.
The film even portrays a range of ages, from Jayne Eastwood’s
knowledgeable elder, Norma, to Kim Poirier’s naive ingénue,
Monica. Snyder reimagines his constructions of white femininity
in a solid attempt to show the competence and success of various
female survivors subverting the catatonia experienced by Judith
O’Dea’s Barbra in George Romero’s zombie classic, Night of the
Living Dead (1968).19 Yet Snyder’s exclusion of black women exem-
plifies contemporary horror’s gendered racism by highlighting the
absence of black women both onscreen and off.
I focus on this tendency toward exclusion as a tradition, for the
problematic lack of representation of women of color in popular
Western texts has been systematically analyzed and reproached in
the latter half of the twentieth century. Snyder’s horror film is not
the first text to problematically erase the presence of black women,
and it certainly won’t be the last. I trace the explicit invisibility of
black women to the early seventh century, where basic precepts for

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 Fig. 2. Mekhi Phifer as Andre and Inna Korobkina as Luda, Dawn of the Dead
(2004).

modern Western art were actively forming.20 Sylvia Wynter, in her

essay “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing The ‘Demonic
Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman,’” critiques William Shakespeare’s
The Tempest (1610) as a text with multiple critically interesting
representations of manhood. The characterizations of Prospero,
Caliban, Ferdinand, Stephano, and Trinculo demonstrate this pre-
disposition by portraying multiple iterations of being white and
black, rural and urban, upper-class and lower-class. Wynter sug-
gests that the most significant idea of the play is the critical and
cultural implications that the only representation of legitimate
womanhood, Miranda, remains a bastion of upper-class whiteness,
as the woman of color, Sycorax—the island’s first inhabitant—is
erased.21 Yet Sycorax refuses to be excluded, as her absence in era-
sure is subverted by her presence as an idea that produces fear and
suspicion in the play’s remaining characters.
I employ the language of cultural critic bell hooks and describe
Sycorax’s position as an “absent presence.”22 Her formerly physi-
cal incarnation of previously carnal existence touches most char-
acters on the island—she gave Caliban life, trapped Ariel, and is
a recently deceased occupier and power broker of the very island
that manifests Prospero’s power.23 Though her physical body has
surrendered, Sycorax is present without the need for either a body
or a voice; The Tempest falsely assumes her self-actualization is not

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 necessary, for her presence is only felt through others’ construc-
tion of her. The assumption that Sycorax no longer matters shat-
ters with Prospero’s emphatic warning that her dark presence and
power are only forgotten by the insolent, as he demands: “Hast
thou forgot the foul witch Sycorax . . . hast thou forgot her?”24
Sycorax’s corporeal death has magnified her subversive presence,
haunting multiple plot points and its participants. Sycorax is now
a hant—or ghost—that remains spiritually and psychologically
present and powerful.
The problematic characterization of Sycorax mirrors the quan-
dary of black women in contemporary horror. It is the absent pres-
ence of black women in the horror genre that imbues my search
for Sycorax—that is, black women in horror—as I investigate her
presence in novels, short fiction, comic books, and film. It is my con-
tention that Sycorax is incorrectly considered absent, moot, an appa-
rition that only haunts nutty liberal professors obsessed with horror.
This text demonstrates the subversive presence of black women in
horror through a critical analysis of incarnations in the genre.
I begin by exploring her characterizations in horror texts.
I insist that black women horror characters are plagued by their
construction as a mistreated tool used to further the more careful
and considerate construction of other characters. The textual reality
of the black woman’s presence highlights the misreading of Robin
Wood’s horror formula.25 This is problematic because the majority
of the critical and textual exploration of horror centers on the nor-
mative experiences of white men; therefore, the anxiety examined
in horror is continuously about the other sides of the white male
binary.26 This penchant actively excludes the black woman, for she
is the non-Other, the Other of the white male’s Others (black men
and white women). The absence is found in the lack of agency
given to the black women horror constructs examined in this text’s
first chapter. They are present in the narrative but problematically
so because their existence is predicated on buttressing the narrative
development of other non-black woman characters.
I continue my mission by exposing Sycorax’s absent presence
in the most unlikely of environs—black feminist literary theory.

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 I explore how the black feminist project of marking and connecting
black women’s literature to the High Arts—an important revision
of the Belles Lettres—actively excludes specific types of women’s
writing and applicable theories for reading classic black feminist
literature. A significant portion of black women’s literature is mar-
ginalized, particularly genre fiction—and for my particular area of
research, horror fiction. This area of the project presents a historical
context for contemporary black women horror texts by connecting
their work with the substantial elements of horror found in classic
black women’s literature. I insist upon removing the necessity for
the pairing absence from Sycorax’s presence. These elements have
often been misnamed and associated with popularly accepted the-
oretical frameworks such as magical realism and trauma theory. In
too many instances, horror texts have been subject to the privileg-
ing of the horror of trauma above the specific genre of horror.
Next, I lay a theoretical foundation for recognizing Sycorax’s
presence in black women’s contemporary literature. I originate
a syncretic theoretical framework that is specifically black and
female—for the texts of these creators reflect the racially gen-
dered simultaneity of oppressions that plague black womanhood
as well as the blurring of the genres of speculative fiction. I adopt
the tenets of black feminist theory and contemporary genre theory
to term how black women purposely obfuscate the lines between
science fiction, fantasy, and horror to deliver a fluid fiction that
grounds itself in traditional African religious practices and epis-
temes. The realization of fluid fiction aids in black women genre
writers articulating a radical black literary subjectivity that centers
black women.
My fourth and final exploration of Sycorax is to develop a black
women’s aesthetic of horror through the framework of folkloric
horror that centers African diasporic women’s spirituality in its
origination. I engage this syncretism to subvert mainstream hor-
ror’s willful blindness to Sycorax’s presence. I explore Sycorax’s
presence in what is considered classic black women’s literature
and through the tenets of the framework even as I later insist that
innovative black women horror writers artfully subvert its elements

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 by incorporating contemporary horror tropes such as zombies and
demons. Finally, I read folkloric horror in black women’s music
and performativity as I demonstrate their intentional embodiment
and conflation of the blueswoman and the conjure woman.

Sycorax Haunts Horror

My critical interests have been piqued by the realization of how
a startling majority of contemporary horror texts, authors, and
the subsequent critical theory that outlines and interrogates the
genre sustain the idea noted by Gloria T. Hull in 1982 that “all
the women are white, and all the blacks are men.”27 The project of
recovering Sycorax remains urgent because the intersecting iden-
tities of black women represent and illuminate the weaknesses in
contemporary horror criticism. It is in the works of critics such
as Carol Clover, Isabel Cristina Piñedo, Natasha Patterson, and
Stephen Harper that the interrogation of horror demonstrates a
problematic cleaving of black women’s identities by dividing their
analysis into ones that examine race or gender—with only a grow-
ing few, Harry Benshoff and Robin R. Coleman-Means, critiquing
the intersections of both. It is here that I enter to continue the
inclusion and analysis of black women characters in horror texts
and the unique positionality of racially gendered constructions and
how their situatedness interrogates and subverts the normativity of
whiteness in feminist horror theory and the normativity of male-
ness in black monstrosity theory. Furthermore, the construction
of theories of horror must become applicable to both the char-
acterizations of black women and black women horror creators.
This more nuanced theorization would serve to strengthen hor-
ror studies as a whole and act as a template for future critiques
that include the multiple intersections of racially gendered horror
constructions. As noted above, I am certainly not the first critic
to notice the fleeting apparitions of black women in horror. But
Searching for Sycorax moves beyond the necessary brevity of book
chapters and journal articles to produce the first sustained critical
examination of black women in contemporary horror.

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 From my analysis of black women characters’ diminished
subjectivity and/or outsized corporeal or emotional strength in
contemporary horror and genre fiction, I conclude the stakes are
these: such stereotypical portraits will impact real black women
by failing to acknowledge the complications their situatedness
brings to feminism, critical race theory, and Western society as a
whole. The ignorance regarding black women’s unique position-
ality particularly subverts the dominant memes of mainstream
feminism’s fight for displays of strength and the ability to work
beside men.28 The same ignorance subverts the dominance of black
critical theory’s focus upon centralizing the black male’s demands
for power and structural change. When black women themselves
construct more realistic portraits of black female characters, the
risks, stakes, or effects are a more holistic and inclusive depiction
of the lived realities of black womanhood. Furthermore, it is in the
best interest of the horror genre and its surrounding industries to
initiate more profound efforts at inclusion. Its formerly ideal cus-
tomer base—white, heterosexual, middle-class young males—can
no longer sustain its development even as those people outside of
the ideal demand more representation. Its potential for survival by
expansion must be rooted in the exploration of other races, sex-
ualities, class statuses, and females—identities and intersections
whose disposable incomes must be tapped into. The inclusion of
black women and the many intersections they represent acts as a
shifting signifier that constitutes such a cross section of poststruc-
tural identities that the critical analysis of black women reflects the
critical realities of all other peoples.29

Black Feminist Theory and Horror

I engage the aforementioned ideas of horror to question Sycorax’s
exclusion and marginalized status in an already ghettoized genre
that is held in such disdain. The significance of my project is four-
pronged. First, I address what bell hooks refers to as film’s “violent
erasure of black womanhood” by expanding hooks’s black feminist
theory of the oppositional gaze to include a horror framework.

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 I examine contemporary horror fiction as a product of the psycho-
logical anxieties associated with black women. These anxieties act
as an interlocutor between historical constructions of Negrophobia
and Gynophobia resulting in a construction of black female char-
acters grounded in the controlling image of the strong black
woman. I contend that this stereotype is employed to suppress the
complexities of black women’s characterizations in horror, for her
black body is often surrendered to the privileging of complicat-
ing non-black and/or non-female characters. I argue for horror
to move beyond stereotypes and demonstrate the revolutionary
inclusion rendered when black female characters are complicated.
Second, I articulate a space to examine horror texts and black
feminist literature through horror frameworks even as I challenge
black feminist theory’s previous unwillingness to do so. I establish
a literary and theoretical history for the writers and their texts that
I explore in the second half of the text. Next, I present a deep revi-
sion of what is currently referred to as black women’s speculative
fiction. I insist it is a misnomer and explicate an ideal that eluci-
dates black women’s purposeful blending of the genres of science
fiction, fantasy, and horror, which I term fluid fiction. I suggest that
black women genre writers employ fluid fiction to achieve a radi-
cal black female subjectivity that openly challenges the exhausted
doctrines of genre fiction. Finally, I present an articulation of folk-
loric horror, a black women horror aesthetic theory that explicates
how the texts of black women horror creators revise and reimagine
African diasporic folklore as a mode of participating in and inter-
rogating contemporary mainstream horror.30
Black women have slowly and painfully been developing as
more significant characters in horror texts since the last quarter of
the twentieth century, yet their constructions continue to sacrifice
their subjectivity in order to privilege their a/object difference. The
problematic nature of black women’s horror constructions has been
most visible in film and media—though I would posit Grendel’s
mother from Beowulf and the aforementioned Sycorax as early
iterations of monstrous black women literary characters. In her
foundational volume Horror Noire: Black in American Horror Films

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 from the 1890s to Present (2011), Robin R. Means Coleman denotes
that blacks in early films were portrayed as “odd and primitive”
with notable characterizations “as savage, deadly natives.”31 These
stereotypes were eventually exacerbated in subsequent horror films
as horror coalesced into a specific film genre in the 1930s. Many of
these resulted in blacks being associated with voodoo—what critic
Ashlee Blackwell refers to as “voodoo horror” in which all the roles
for black women were “embedded with the idea that black women
use voodoo as a retaliation against whites.”32 Blackwell lists filmic
examples such as Chloe, Love is Calling You (1934), Ouanga (1936),
and King of the Zombies (1941).33
Moving forward, there are few examples of black women in
horror films until we arrive at what critic Harry Benshoff refers
to as Blaxploitation horror, which included films such as Blacula
(1972), Scream Blacula Scream (1973), Abby (1974), and Sugar Hill
(1974). Each film contained central black women characters, but
the majority embodied what Coleman refers to as the “Enduring
Woman,” which describes the black women horror characters of
this era as “soldiers in ongoing battles of discrimination, in which
total victory is elusive.”34 Too often, the boogeymen in these films
were differing manifestations of the racialized sexism and “cor-
ruption” faced by black urban women of the time.35 It is clear that
even as the presence of black women in horror films has grown,
until recently there has been a distinct failure in the development
of complex characterizations of black women. It is here, in the
growing negotiated autonomy of black women in horror, that the
four chapters of this project dwell.36
The first chapter, “The Importance of Neglected Intersections:
Characterizations of Black Women in Horror Texts,” examines
the problematic nonmonstrous character constructions found
in the paucity of black female characters that do exist in horror.
I suggest that construction of these nonmonstrous characters stems
from the belief in and the perpetuation of the stigmatype37 of the
strong black woman that objectifies and allows for a racially gen-
dered removal/framework that distances and distorts the identifi-
catory potential of the ideal viewer. I read Michonne from Robert

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 Kirkman’s comic book series The Walking Dead (2003) and Selena
from Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) as I determine how and
why these characters are continually Othered, even as central char-
acters of the narrative.
In a powerfully short blog post celebrating black women in hor-
ror, poet Linda Addison traces the origins of the very first appear-
ance of horror in black literature.38 Addison encounters what she
considers the origin of black horror in the folktales found in Every
Tongue Got to Confess (2001), a collection of stories painstakingly
recorded—in early twentieth-century southern black dialect—
by the then budding anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston: “Besides
themes of religion, family and other social concepts I also found
two sections named: ‘Devil Tales’ and ‘Witch and Hant Tales’
(Hant means ‘haunt’ or ‘ghost’).”39 Hurston’s work highlights black
interest in horror as a long-established reality in its communal lit-
erature—the rich oral folk culture and tales passed down through
familial generations, for Bonnie Barthold insists that “the teller of
tales [is] no less than the contemporary novelist.”40
The most significant critical inquiry of this project demon-
strates and analyzes how black women creators are fighting this
erasure by re-creating a genre that speaks to their experience even
as it subverts dominant horror themes steeped in its contempo-
rary hegemonic discourse. The second chapter, “Black Feminism
and the Struggle for Literary Respectability,” generates a history of
black feminist literary theory and the paucity of past discussions of
genre fiction—specifically horror. I insist that in the battle to bring
black women’s literature into the Canon, speculative texts were
sacrificed in order to achieve literary respectability. The third chap-
ter, “Black Women Writing Fluid Fiction: An Open Challenge to
Genre Normativity,” expands upon the problems of defining genre
fiction I explored earlier in this chapter. I dissect the somewhat
vague distinctions between the genres of science fiction, fantasy,
and horror by employing well-known examples of each genre. The
chapter also explores the multiple definitions of speculative fiction
and how the term increases the imprecise nature of defining these
popular genres. Finally, I present a literary framework termed

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 “fluid fiction” that allows black women genre writers to oscillate
between the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, lead-
ing to a radically liberatory act that hews space for racially gen-
dered genre fiction. The final chapter, “Folkloric Horror: A New
Way of Reading Black Women’s Creative Horror,” moves toward
a black woman’s horror aesthetic that privileges self-articulation
even as it challenges dominant readings of black womanhood.
I compose a specifically black and female horror aesthetic, “folkloric
horror,” that demonstrates how black women horror writers have
grounded their aesthetic in the traditional religious practices of
Africa and privilege the realization of the black spiritual feminine.
I begin with the reading of two classic black feminist texts, Gloria
Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) and Erna Brodber’s Louisiana (1994),
through the folkloric horror framework. I continue by analyzing
the works of contemporary black women horror texts, Chesya
Burke’s tale “Chocolate Park” (2004) and Kiini Ibura Salaam’s
short story “Rosamojo” (2003), to demonstrate how they begin to
subvert the elements of folkloric horror by incorporating revised
horror tropes. I end the chapter by expanding folkloric horror to
the music performances of Memphis Minnie and Nina Simone
in which I suggest they are simultaneously embodying and sub-
verting the constructs of the blueswoman and the conjure woman.
In the search for Sycorax, this project reveals that she rescues
herself—and can be found in the works of a growing body of
contemporary black women horror writers.

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 
The Importance of Neglected
Intersections
Characterizations of Black Women in
Mainstream Horror Texts

All the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave.
—Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith

Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality.

—bell hooks

In June 2005, black feminist critics Yolanda Hood and Gwendolyn D.

Pough edited an issue of the Femspec journal dedicated to black
women and speculative fiction in which they questioned the
“surge in fantastic representations of Black womanhood.”1 The
critics were the first to make a scholarly note of how black women
appeared to be integral characters in the resurgent popularity of
genre texts in popular culture. A cursory perusal of postmillennial
characterizations in horror reveals a fruitful presence of significant
black women in Hollywood—from Angela Basset’s protagonist in
Supernova (2000), to Naomie Harris in 28 Days Later (2002), to
Sanaa Lathan in AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004), to Jessica Lucas

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 in Evil Dead (2013). The numbers expand when black women are
counted beyond the central role, as seen in the supporting perfor-
mances of Kelly Rowland in Freddy vs. Jason (2003) and Elise Neal
and Jada Pinkett Smith in Scream 2 (1997). Television has quickly
followed suit with its sudden realization that serialized horror—
when done well—results in astronomical advertising revenues and
also features several black women actors, such as Gina Torres as
Jasmine in season four of Angel (1999–2004) and Bella Crawford
in Hannibal (2013–2015), Rutina Wesley’s Tara Thornton in True
Blood (2008–2014), Kat Graham as Bonnie Bennett in The Vampire
Diaries (2009–), Danai Gurira as Michonne and Sonequa Martin-
Green as Sasha in The Walking Dead (2010–), Necole Beharie as
Lt. Abbie Mills in Sleepy Hollow (2013–2017), and Halle Berry as
Molly Woods in Extant (2014–2015). Comic books prove to be
light years ahead of sustained characterizations of black women,
most popularly Michonne from Robert Kirkman’s ongoing comic
opus The Walking Dead (2003–), Mira Nygus in Atsushi Ōkubo’s
manga Soul Eaters (2004–2013), as well as Yoruichi Shihōin of Tite
Kubo’s manga Bleach series (2001–).2 Still, the growing number of
black women characters in popular horror culture fails to account
for the problematic nature of their constructions.
This chapter exposes mainstream horror’s simplistic character-
izations of black women by examining their presence in one of
horror’s most celebrated subgenres, the postapocalyptic zombie
text. The zombie text works as an entrance to black women’s char-
acterizations in horror for multiple reasons. It is an easily definable
horror genre in which there are multiple iterations of black wom-
anhood to explore. Even as the number of black women charac-
ters in horror has steadily increased, the manifestations have been
incredibly disparate, from entering previously established horror
franchises—Aliens, Predator, and Scream—to science fiction hor-
ror such as Supernova and a television series centered on cannibal-
istic serial killers, Hannibal. This is a good problem to have, but in
clearing a space for black women horror characterizations outside
of the monstrous, the postapocalyptic zombie text proves the most
cohesive as well as the most fruitful. Exposing horror’s historically

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 Fig. 3. Clockwise from top left: Angela Bassett as Dr. Kaela Evers, Supernova
(2000); Kelly Rowland as Kia Waterson, Freddy vs. Jason (2003); Sanaa Lathan
as Alexa Woods, AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004); Jada Pinkett Smith as Maureen,
Scream 2 (1997); Jessica Lucas as Olivia, Evil Dead (2013); and Rutina Wesley as
Tara Thornton, True Blood (2008).

unbridled themes of Gynophobia and Negrophobia reveals the

dangerously simplistic notion that the presence of black women
is enough. My intervention operates within the black feminist
framework of the “oppositional gaze” that demands more com-
plex characterizations and grounds my later arguments for the
self-articulation of black women in horror. The power of the oppo-
sitional gaze acts as a powerful framework in horror by analyzing
the black women characters in Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead
comic book series (2003–) and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002).

All the Women Are White

Fascinating work concerning gender continues within critical studies
of horror, but even after thirty years this work has often proven
inattentive to the intersections of race, failing to examine its own

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 privileging of whiteness. In Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in
the Modern Horror Film (1992), horror critic Carol Clover insists
that the anxieties surrounding gender differences distinguish them-
selves as a crucial theme in horror films.3 Another critic, Natasha
Patterson, furthers Clover’s insistence on the importance of gender
in horror, particularly the zombie film, even as she critiques her.4
Still, both feminist critics are guilty of creating a framework that
“privileges sexual difference [and] actively suppresses recognition
of race, reenacting and mirroring the erasure of black womanhood
that occurs in films, silencing any discussion of racial difference—
of racialized sexual difference.”5 “Identificatory permeability” in
regards to gender, specifically in the final girl or the rape-revenge
protagonist, and the creation of a democratic textual viewing space
with the female survivor of the zombie apocalypse unfortunately
default to explorations of white womanhood. Brigid Cherry rec-
ognizes this folly and insists that “one factor of identity cannot
easily be analyzed without considering others: gendered identities
can be strongly linked to class or racial identity . . . and the one
cannot be discussed without the other.”6 Clover’s and Patterson’s
neglect of the powerful implications of the intersections of iden-
tity, particularly in regards to the constructions of black femininity,
severely undercuts the strength of their theoretical approaches to
how gender operates in horror.
The final girl is the protagonist of the slasher film who rep-
resents a surprising amalgam of differing normative gender con-
structions to connote an active defense of nimble strength and
mental acuity. Clover depicts how the theory of the final girl
proves to be an interesting taxonomy of specific character traits.
The final girl “fight[s] back . . . with ferocity and even kill[s] the
killer on [her] own, without help from the outside.”7 The final girl
is intelligent and resourceful, particularly in the closing fight with
the film’s killer where she viciously battles for her life through a
gauntlet testing both her mental and physical toughness. And it
is the genre of horror that allows the final girl so much room for
agency. Cherry deems the final girl fascinating because she subverts
Western patriarchy on multiple levels. She confronts those societal

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 forces that threaten women because there is no authority figure to
intervene, and she must survive using her own capabilities.8
The most interesting characteristic of the final girl is that she
is sexually unavailable, chiefly because she is not wholly feminine
in her depiction; in fact, she is quite boyish in both construction
and name: “Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and
other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from
the other girls and ally her, ironically, with the very boys she fears
or rejects, not to speak of the killer himself.”9 Clover’s theory of the
final girl relies upon the normativity of whiteness. This is evident
in the theory’s lack of sustainability when the raced intersection of
blackness is laid upon it.
The admirable masculinization of Clover’s final girl becomes
incredibly problematic when she is racially read as black. Her
blackness heightens her masculinity, demonstrating the “perceived
inherent masculinity of blackness.”10 Calvin Hernton problem-
atically notes that the historical enslavement of black women
“has produced in many Negro females a sort of ‘studism’ which
expressed itself in a strong matriarchal drive . . . black women
are too demanding, too strict, too inconsiderate and too ‘mas-
culine.’”11 Hortense Spillers criticizes the tendencies of twenti-
eth-century scholars, both black and white, male and female, to
pathologize black women for possessing survival skills developed
in a racist, sexist, and classist world constructed against them: “the
African-American female’s ‘dominance’ and ‘strength’ come to be
interpreted by later generations—both black and white, oddly
enough—as a ‘pathology,’ as an instrument of castration.”12 The
display of strength in unimaginable circumstances easily parallels
the experiences of the final girl in the horror film’s concluding
chase scene. The coping mechanisms black women developed to
deal with their multiple oppressions become a detriment to this
particular characterization in contemporary horror. For the black
woman’s display of strength is read pejoratively even as the strength
of the (white) final girl is read as positive, plucky instead of patho-
logical, independent initiative and not a series of acts threatening
castration.

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 The racial realities of the black woman shift the framework
of Clover’s criticism. The final girl is significant because of the
white male audience member’s ability to identify easily with her
peril and fight for survival. I build upon what Clover refers to
as the “majority viewer” of horror films—young males—which
I expand to include their assumed whiteness, heterosexuality, and
middle-classness. The crux of Clover’s criticism pivots upon her
insistence that the viewer’s “identificatory powers are unbelievably
elastic” particularly in regard to gender.13 Yet I believe this insis-
tence should be pushed further, for Clover fails to account for how
or if the “majority viewer” can be as malleable with his identity in
terms of race, particularly at the same time as he is being so elastic
in terms of gender.
The problematic assumption of whiteness as a foundation for
Clover’s theoretical outline reemerges with the rape-revenge pro-
tagonist. This particular horror plot centers on the appalling phys-
ical and mental violation of a (usually) female protagonist by one
or more male individuals. The ghastliness of the plot continues with
the central character’s terrifically violent revenge visited upon her
perpetrators as a vengeful vigilante. Its success hinges upon the male
viewer’s ability to identify with the gruesome trauma visited upon
and conducted by the central female character. Clover insists that the
act of rape in these films is far larger than an individual violation of
the protagonist but also serves as a “social and political act . . . [that
comments upon] the power dynamic between men and women
that makes rape happen in the first place and . . . that makes it
so eminently avengeable.”14 The rape-revenge protagonist lays
bare the pervasiveness of the structural misogyny that permeates
Western society and how women live in constant threat of its con-
suming powers.15 Clover’s findings are incredibly significant for
their ability to allow horror’s majority viewer to identify with the
problems that occur with gender difference, such as the complex
identificatory slippage that occurs with experiencing the rape and
victimization of an (often) female protagonist. Yet again, acknowl-
edging the layer of race allows for a more holistic view of the soci-
etal structures that oppress all women, not just white women.

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 Natasha Patterson’s “Cannibalizing Gender and Genre: A
Feminist Re-Vision of George Romero’s Zombie Films” focuses
specifically upon zombie horror. Patterson believes that zombie
narratives “make possible alternative visions of femininity, open-
ing up spaces for the female viewer that do not rely significantly
on gender stereotypes that anticipate the passivity or masochism
of the female viewer.”16 Here, Patterson uses Romero to expose
yet another weakness in Clover’s theory of “identificatory perme-
ability,” for it assumes that the viewer can easily identify the lines
between gender identity and the oscillation that occurs between
them.17 Patterson insists that “Romero’s films refute any notion of
a ‘gendered gaze’” and expands her analysis beyond the “majority
viewer” to include the experiences of female observers.18 Patterson
thereby proposes the concept of a “democratic textual viewing
space,” which is “[a] state of spectatorial ambivalence . . . due to my
simultaneous feelings of fear and fascination . . . in which I am able
to question things, even as I recognize my own complicity with
social inequalities.”19 I choose to push Patterson’s concept of dem-
ocratic textual viewing space further, beyond her feminist inclu-
sion of a normatively white female gaze with which to examine
the all-assuming whiteness of the zombie text. Patterson’s democ-
racy remains exclusive to the tenets of whiteness: “it does not even
consider the possibility that women can construct an oppositional
gaze via an understanding and awareness of the politics of race and
racism.”20 Contemporary horror theory must surpass the exclusivity
of the idea that all womanhood is white; this chapter demands that
critical examinations of blackness and womanhood must ensue.

All the Blacks Are Men

Contemporary feminist criticism has built paradigms such as the
final girl and the rape-revenge protagonist over the last thirty years
with which to evaluate how gender is characterized in postmodern
horror fiction.21 Unfortunately, much of horror criticism—includ-
ing feminist horror criticism—has been limited to the construc-
tion of women in horror films, which typically feature lithe and

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 attractive women being violently dismembered by psychotic killers.
Concurrently, critics who study race theory have continued to ana-
lyze how people of color (specifically blacks) have been filmically
depicted as monstrous.22 However, much of this study has been
relegated to the realm of blaxploitation films, particularly the con-
struction of male characters in that genre. There remains a marked
dearth of criticism on the portrayal of black women within the
genre of horror, even as horror has reemerged as a pop culture and
academic phenomenon.
Scholars such as Aalya Ahmad, Harry M. Benshoff, Robin R.
Means-Coleman, Annalee Newitz, Isabel Piñedo, and Robin
Wood have examined blackness in horror, but their studies of it—
even those feminist studies among them—have mostly centered on
the textual experiences of black men, with some minimal attention
paid to black men as viewers.23 This reality highlights that black
women are again made invisible when horror criticism discusses
race. Thus, in this chapter I investigate how two critics examine the
intersections of blackness and monstrosity in order to highlight
the blind spots of contemporary criticism. Cultural critic Annalee
Newitz explores how the monstrosities of black bodies and white
anxiety comment upon the instability of Western capitalism,
while film critic Harry M. Benshoff examines the black gaze and
reimagines the queering of blaxploitation cinema. Benshoff, whose
analysis proves quite encompassing, even attempts to outline an
approach to black women in blaxploitation horror, although the
majority of his treatment centers on black men. Still, throughout
the growing amount of critical work done on blacks in horror,
these “interrogating black looks [are] mainly concerned with issues
of race and racism, the way racial domination of blacks by whites
overdetermine[s] representation. They [are] rarely concerned with
gender.”24 It is here that I appreciate the foundations that have
been laid, but my contention is that none of the aforementioned
horror frameworks address the peculiarities of black women’s
positionality. My intervention uses a black feminist framework to
engage in nascent horror theories that articulate and establish a
critical space for black women.

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 The following critical race analyses of horror texts reveal
the urgent need for my racially gendered critique. In Pretend
We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, Annalee
Newitz’s examination of the undead in horror texts acknowledges
the dread of racial difference that so often permeates the works, yet
still manages to center itself on an (albeit incredibly interesting)
examination of whiteness. Newitz insists that zombie films of both
the past and present explore the dis-ease and growing horror at
the increasing instability of white supremacy, and that the reality
of zombies represents the “demise of white power and Western
rationalism.”25 Newitz reads George Romero’s Night of the Living
Dead as just as much a treatise on class as on race, particularly
in her analysis of the central character, Ben. Ben is an educated
leader, and his raced blackness is aptly juxtaposed against the over-
whelming horror of the raced whiteness of the swarms of zom-
bies that plague the living. Ben appears lively and dynamic when
read against the catatonic Barbra and the shuffling zombies. Ben is
a “middle-class black hero” who is ultimately destroyed by a
“self-defeating, dying whiteness” as he is killed not by a zombie,
but by a mob of white men with guns who mistake him for a
zombie.26 Newitz implicitly suggests that this mistaken identity is
purposeful, that the mob is unable and unwilling to distinguish the
differences between a black male who is a monstrous zombie and a
black male survivor. He dies simply because he is a black man with
power in a white-dominated world.
A similar end finds African Prince Mumawaldee, best
known as the titular lead of Blacula (1972), who is critiqued by
Benshoff along with other blaxploitation horror monsters in his
essay “Blaxploitation Horror Films: Generic Reappropriation or
Reinscription?” as “agents of black pride and black power” for they
“depicted a stronger, more militant image of African Americans
who triumphed over white antagonists.”27 This sympathetic
reimagining of Blacula and other black monsters like him reveals
the negotiated gaze of the marginalized black community. These
audience members “identify with monsters out to topple dominant
social institutions (that oppress both movie monsters and real-life

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 minorities) in ways that can be a pleasurable and potentially
empowering act for many film goers.”28 Instead of seeing him as a
perpetrator of vampiric evil upon the black community, Benshoff
suggests that Blacula is an incredibly sympathetic character whose
curse of vampirism becomes a metaphor for the “lingering leg-
acy of racism” that “enslaved” him.29 Blacula also revises W.E.B.
Du Bois’s theory of double-consciousness, for he must struggle
between his two identities as a deposed African prince and a
European vampire.30 Though powerful, critiques of black horror
must continue moving beyond a centering on the black male expe-
rience to the oppositional gaze. Racism is continuously gendered,
even in these readings of Ben and Blacula; their masculinity is a
threat to white patriarchal power that must be destroyed. How can
critics continue to focus their theories on less than half of the black
population?
Benshoff attempts to incorporate a reading of black women
in horror, though his analysis is hindered by the limited textual
data the blaxploitation horror film genre provides. While these
films often prove successful in their critique of race, “[they] were
unable to withstand the genre’s more regular demonization of
gender and sexuality, which are arguably more deeply embed-
ded as monstrous within both the horror film and the culture at
large.”31 Blaxploitation horror films such as Abby (1974) and Sugar
Hill (1974) featured black women as lead characters, yet remained
incredibly problematic. Benshoff successfully critiques the genre
for upholding an antiquated ideal of black machismo, often at the
cost of complex female characters along with the development of
the blaxploitation superwoman, whose abnormal strength threat-
ens the masculinity of the central male protagonist.
I contend that the monstrosity of black women stems from this
stereotype of the black Superwoman, also known as the “strong
black woman.” Michele Wallace describes it as “[an] intricate web
of mythology surround[ing] the black woman, [in which] a funda-
mental image emerges . . . she is a Superwoman.”32 This mythology
includes the “problematic assumptions” that “strong Black women
are the stark and deviant opposites of weak and appropriately

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 feminine white women, that strength is a natural quality of Black
women and a litmus test for their womanhood, and that being
strong accurately characterizes Black women’s motivations and
behaviors.”33 This trope actively dehumanizes black women, con-
tributing to their Otherness and hindering the identificatory per-
meability that allows audience members to identify with black
male monsters. The characterization of the black woman as overly
strong and superhuman in all aspects is a method of dehumaniza-
tion.34 Zora Neale Hurston famously spoke to this active dehu-
manization in Their Eyes Were Watching God when Nanny states
that “de nigger woman is de mule uh de world.”35 Constructions
of black women as unnaturally strong and the pernicious effect
of this have been examined in multiple areas of black femi-
nist studies. Trudier Harris pathologizes this so-called strength
as a disease, termed the “virus of strength,” a “form of ill health
[that] perpetuates dysfunction in literary families.”36 Sociologist
Patricia Hill Collins deems the strong black woman one of the
“controlling images” that prevents black women from achieving
self-actualization both within and outside of the black community.
Concurrently, Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant insists that the strong
black woman presents a “problematic discourse” where “strength is
likened to a performance and a façade rather than an honest reflec-
tion of Black women” that privileges self-silencing and self-nega-
tion.37 The most dangerous aspect of the “strong black woman” is
her inherent simplicity. Such a stigmatype ignores the complexity
of black womanhood and its radical potential to subvert multiple
problematic identities simultaneously.
Thus, the very presence of black women in the horror text
complicates existing horror theory on black monstrosity. Black
female monsters have a history that begins in slavery, much like
Blacula’s Prince Mumuwalde. However, although they are women,
they were whipped and lynched without equivocation, and their
sex was rarely, if ever, a mitigating circumstance in the meting out
of punishment. Sugar, the black female protagonist, uses Vodou
gods (loas) and rituals to raise zombies who were former slaves to
avenge her fiancé’s murder. Her hair becomes a natural Afro, a far

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 more Africanized style whenever she employs the zombies.38 But
she also explicitly and continuously runs into racialized sexism in
her quest for vengeance. She is unable to rely upon sheer force
to entrap these men; the movie implies that she outsources her
violence using voodoo because she is a woman. As the men are
lured to their deaths, Sugar is shown using her “feminine wiles.”
The men repeatedly characterize and denigrate her very existence
as a black woman, particularly in regards to the voracious sexual
appetites associated with black women.39 In the end, Sugar exacts
her revenge, but only by reinforcing dangerous sexual stereotypes
of black women. Thus, Sugar’s potential as a subversive character is
heavily muted by blaxploitation gender dynamics.
The pernicious falsehoods that are associated with black
female sexuality also contribute to their Otherness as black female
monsters. The construction of black women’s sexuality in the
Western hegemonic imaginary has, more often than not, been
defined against the sexual mores constructed for white women.
Many of these mores were established during slavery and became
more explicitly defined in the nineteenth-century’s Cult of True
Womanhood. The ideology of True Womanhood identified four
cardinal virtues of white womanhood: piety, purity, submissive-
ness, and domesticity.40 True women had “delicate constitutions”
and were “easily fatigued.”41 Hazel V. Carby notes that these values
were the opposite qualifications of what was required to survive as
a black woman in the century; “an absence of the qualities of piety
and purity [was] a crucial signifier.”42 Black women were actively
excluded from what became the functioning definition of woman-
hood. Carby insists that “white women were constructed as chaste
even as black women were portrayed as overtly sexual.”43 Notably,
it is this context that produced the stereotype of the black Jezebel,
the sexually avaricious black girl/woman who seduces the white
male slave master/overseer. Thus, black women continue the cul-
tural tradition of Sycorax, a characterization to be defined against,
marginalized, and passive in actualization. Yet by dismantling the
hierarchies of the hegemony, black feminist cultural critics dis-
cover the radical possibilities of black woman–centered critiques.

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 The Oppositional Gaze and Horror
bell hooks finds power in the act of “looking back” directly into
the face of hegemonic power.44 She hearkens back to its subversive
power and trauma among African Americans. The black enslaved
are punished for looking inappropriately at white authority
figures; Jim Crow America brutally murders the young Emmitt
Till for looking at a white woman.45 Even today, young black men
are tasered, beaten, and killed by police officers for the subversive
act of “eye-fucking.”46 hooks refers to the gaze as an act in which
powerful subversion intertwines with trauma. Looking back is a
dangerous temptation that must be used wisely, for if noticed by
the receiver of this gaze, consequences may range from reprimand
to death.
Hegemonic power as domination controls the power of the
gaze, yet the act of watching film has the potential for power.47 Its
privilege is demonstrated in the inability of the marginalized to
openly possess it. But film is watched in the darkness of a movie
theater, the privacy of one’s home, and in the public privacy of
the coffee shop listening to headphones. The dominant’s display
of the spectacle of film lays itself bare and makes it vulnerable to
those it actively ignores and casts out. It is here that a slippage
occurs and oppositional readings formulate and ferment, for the
act of viewership by the marginalized becomes an individuated
experience outside of the dominant’s purview. In these ruptures
that the hegemony fails to recognize, the very act of looking has
become “a site of resistance.”48
hooks recognizes the potential of the filmic as an opportunity
for black women to employ what she terms the oppositional gaze
by building upon the hesitancy among this critical population
because of film’s historic erasure of black women.49 Black women
have always had a negotiated reading of film. It is a necessary act to
ensure their psychic survival in a genre that has limited the poten-
tiality of their lived realities to mammies, Sapphires, and Jezebels,
and only when it has chosen to acknowledge their existence at all.
Black women watch films wholly acknowledging that those images

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 are part of “a system of knowledge and power reproducing and
maintaining white supremacy.”50 These women approach a com-
plicated space of agency where they “experience viewing pleasure
in a context where looking was also about contestation and con-
frontation.” hooks takes what had so often been thought of as a
subjugated position of black women for their “absent presence” in
cinema studies and revises it, privileging their act of looking as
one that is exclusive and gained only through years of lived expe-
riences outside the powerfully complicated constructions of race
and patriarchy that inform the foundations of film theory. For
black women actively refuse to identify with either the victim of
the gaze or its perpetrator, excavating a place of agency (rupture/
disjuncture) outside of the powerful dynamic.
The oppositional gaze is named as the result of the “resis-
tance, struggle, reading, and looking ‘against the grain,’ that black
women have been able to value our process of looking.”51 hooks
advocates for black women to “star[e] dangerously,” embodying
a specific sense of knowing and critique that uniquely enhances
both feminist film studies and critical race theory.52 Still it must
be acknowledged that the viewing pleasure that black women
could experience was often heavily mediated by their peculiar
position—a mediation that often turned to pain.53 And again
hooks revises, by constructing the oppositional gaze as “a theory
of looking relations where the cinematic visual delight is the plea-
sure of interrogation.”54 Following the critical backlash against the
tiresome characterizations of white manhood, Searching for Sycorax
demands an increase in the number of contemporary horror texts
that feature and center significant and complicated characteriza-
tions of black women.55
Centering the white male experience and its repugnant fasci-
nation with black men or white women is not only problematic,
it ultimately fails to illustrate the various intersections of race and
gender that interrogate whiteness and maleness. Furthermore, this
practice remains incredibly exclusionary, propagating the Western
hierarchical framework of privileging the experiences of the
white male. I contend that critically exploring, via an oppositional

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 gaze, the characterizations of black females, both monstrous and
non-monstrous, pushes horror theory to mine the critically rich
ores of the intersections of race and gender.
“The female look—a look given preeminent position in the horror
film—shares the male fear of the monster’s freakishness, but also
recognizes the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her
own difference.”56 Brigid Cherry acknowledges that the identities
of audiences heavily affect their negotiated viewing of the film text,
and Benshoff names this effect an act of “queering” the text.57 I push
these critical ideas further by integrating them together, informing
the oppositional gaze as an act of viewing the horror text from
a place of rupture—the marginalized position of black women—
which influences their negotiated reading of a text that either
ignores them or deems them freakish monstrosities. Black women
are so far removed from the “majority viewer” that they can find
powerful subversive potential in the disjunctures of zombie horror
texts.58 The oppositional gaze moves beyond the democratic tex-
tual viewing space in which Patterson advocates, for its grounding
in whiteness prevents a true democracy. Black women are critical
spectators from a location that is disrupted. It is from this rupture,
this interstice outside the mainstream, that I have critiqued the gaps
found in previous horror theory, and it is also from this rupture that
I will analyze contemporary zombie texts of Robert Kirkland and
Danny Boyle. I advocate for all horror critics—not simply black
women—to use and expand the oppositional gaze, to move beyond
the simple binaries that too many Western horror texts perpetuate.
Horror critics must move beyond identificatory permeability to a
sustained interrogation of the assumed majority status, of male and
female, black and white, and the oscillations in-between, as well as
any other intersectional identifications of the viewer.

Black Women as Complicated Characters of Zombie Horror

George Romero centers his classic movies on the zombies them-
selves: he appears cinematically obsessed with how well zom-
bies display a humanity that is often more powerful than that of

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 the humans themselves. Natasha Patterson believes that Romero is
calling for societal destabilization by continually drawing the view-
er’s gaze to the zombie and away from the humans.59 Newer cre-
ators in the genre shift the focus to the mental and physical states
of the survivors. After the initial onslaught of blood, horror, and
guts, the zombies become a background of groans, an ever-present
danger to the text’s characters, an important cause for concern, but
rarely the main focus of the ongoing psychological drama.60 The
difference is crucial because the focus upon the survivors offers
a glimpse into the potential to actively revise societal hierarchies
as a matter of survival. The decisions, discussions, and emergence
of leaders attempt to subvert our traditional cultural hegemonies,
but far too often the tensions explored and their resulting conse-
quences simply reinforce them.
Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) and Robert Kirkman’s The
Walking Dead (2003) both contain complex constructions of black
female characters, Selena and Michonne, respectively. These char-
acters, though groundbreaking by virtue of their very presence,
still necessitate a critique of their construction from the analytical
ruptures of black feminist theory. They must be examined within
their sociocritical contexts and from the standpoint of how they
reimagine classically gendered horror movie constructions. Both
authors also place classic horror film tropes pertaining to women
within a zombie context. Kirkman racializes the rape-revenge
protagonist in his creation of Michonne, while Boyle uses Selena
as a fresh take on the final girl. Each creator uses the dynamics
of zombie horror film to broach the stereotypes that riddle the
constructions of the strong black woman, the stereotypes of black
female sexuality, and the powerful race and gender dynamics that
influence the systematic rape of black women.61 Finally, I posit
that Boyle is successful in complicating Selena even as Kirkman’s
attempt to bring complexity to his characterization of Michonne
ultimately fails in his surrender of deepening her characterization
to privileging the revelation of another facet of The Governor.62
Michonne and Selena complicate their respective horror film
female protagonistic tropes in their constructions as the stereotypical

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 “strong black woman.” It is necessary to note that the perpetua-
tion of the “strong black woman’” stereotype expands beyond the
limited scope of black female monsters and becomes insidiously
applicable to black female characterizations in horror texts as a
whole, and zombie texts in particular. Too often, the supposed
inordinate strength of black women becomes the starting point
for all characterizations of black women, be they monstrous or not.
I insist that this textual reality interferes with the identificatory
permeability majority viewers are able to experience with (white)
female protagonists. The dehumanization that occurs with this ste-
reotype, even as it occurs to a lesser extent than with black female
monsters, is a hurdle that must be acknowledged and overcome
within contemporary zombie theory. Kirkman and Boyle success-
fully initiate a subversion of the stereotype by building upon it,
expanding its parameters as they begin to construct multifaceted
black women characters who are allowed to possess the full range
of their humanity.63 Yet mainstream contemporary horror criticism
has yet to catch up to the transgressive nature of characters such as
Michonne and Selena, and this is why this project’s intervention
proves necessary.
Michonne is shown as a strong black woman from the moment
she is introduced with a stoic silence. She arrives at the prison that
Rick Grimes and the other survivors have taken over dressed in a
hooded cape and accompanied by two coffled, rotted zombies who
follow her lead obediently. Michonne enters the prison compound
after proving her worthiness and saving the life of one of the survi-
vors. Her construction as the strong black woman continues as she
settles into life in the compound. She has quickly adapted to the new
dangers of a world occupied by zombies, an adaptability Kirkman
has heretofore associated only with his male characters. For “the
construction of strength [among black women] allows both onlook-
ers and a woman herself to de-emphasize her struggle, to disconnect
from any assistance, and to turn a blind eye to the real oppression
in the context she is facing.”64 Michonne is differentiated as her
story slowly unfolds to the readers. She no longer defines herself as a
mother: “I had two kids. Two girls. I also had a boyfriend, a mother,

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 a brother, two sisters, an ex-husband, a job, a mortgage, and a whole
lot of other stuff. I don’t have a whole hell of a lot anymore. Things
have changed.”65 These horrific losses are similar to those recounted
and experienced by so many other characters in the comic, but none
has carried their burden with the quiet endurance of Michonne, the
embodiment of the strong black woman.
Michonne’s creation as a black woman not only distinguishes
the raced and gendered Otherness of her character, it allows each
construction to build upon and compound the impact of the other.
Kirkman continues to highlight Michonne’s difference as she is
also shown making expert use of a katana to dispatch a bothersome
zombie.66 Her blackness is implicitly associated with a certain mas-
culinity that actively separates her from the rote ideas of femininity
associated with the ideals of white womanhood: demure, domestic,
delicate, and in constant need of male protection. Michonne pos-
sesses a sense of capability heretofore unseen in any of the (white)
women in the series who have been purposely domesticated and
typically feminized.67 No other women in the group possess such a
capability to protect themselves in such dangerous circumstances.
Rick teaches his seven-year-old son, Carl, how to shoot properly,
yet fails to do the same for his adult wife, Lori. The women are
routinely sent away to complete such domestic duties as laundry
and child care while the men forage for food and fight zombies.
Only Andrea, a young white woman, becomes quite adept as a
markswoman, particularly with a rifle. Yet her capabilities with the
rifle are tempered by her de facto adoption of Mitch and Donna’s
twins. Her femininity is again solidified by her marked talent as a
seamstress for the entire group.68
Kirkman begins constructing Michonne as a racially gendered
stereotype, but then he begins to complicate her characterization
by allowing her to explicitly express vulnerability. After spend-
ing some time in the compound, the panels show a close-up of
her face as she is having an earnest conversation with someone,
attempting to convince the other person that she has made the
right decision in coming to the prison for safety. The conversation
is interrupted by another character, and the panel then expands

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 to a wide shot that takes up the entire page, showing an empty
room.69 This exchange demonstrates that Michonne is not inscru-
table. She needs someone to talk to; she needs help to survive like
any other character; she has simply been alone so long that she
has developed dissociative personalities to cope with the tragedy
associated with the zombie apocalypse.
Michonne continues to complicate the stereotype of the strong
black woman by establishing a connection to the other black male
character, Tyrese, whom she befriends and eventually seduces. She
and Tyrese find a kindredness in spirit as they converse and find
multiple areas of mutual interests. Different facets of Michonne
begin to emerge, illuminating a dawning complexity—we learn
that she is a former athlete, enjoyed watching and playing sports,
and loves to workout and lift weights. Still, Michonne’s seduction
of Tyrese proves problematic, for it is presented in direct contrast
against the construction of Tyrese’s blond-haired, light-eyed girl-
friend, Carol, who is presented as typically “feminine” and contin-
ually needs male protection. Tyrese is portrayed as being actively
seduced by Michonne, who clearly knows of his relationship with
Carol. His words and his own personal agency are overshadowed by
the unstoppable sexuality of Michonne, for the black Superwoman
is infinite in her sexual appetites.70 The nature of the sex between
Michonne and Tyrese and its presentation are also illicit. There
is no romance, no tender acts are portrayed; Michonne barely
even speaks. She simply performs fellatio upon Tyrese despite
his (weak) protest. This scene is significant particularly when it
is placed within the historic context of black women’s sexuality.
Frances Smith Foster insists that “black women became closely
identified with illicit sex. . . . She was not pure and thus not a model
of womanhood.”71 Kirkman clearly juxtaposes Michonne’s willing-
ness to perform “dirty” sexual acts against Carol’s reaction to oral
sex. Carol is portrayed as beyond unwilling; she is literally unable
to perform the act, evidence of her conjugal sanctity.72 Again, the
issue of normativity arises. Michonne performs a non-procreative
and therefore non-normative act upon Tyrese, further distinguish-
ing her sexuality from that of Carol.

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 Kirkman also uses the placement of Michonne in a zombie
context to reimagine the parameters of the rape-revenge protago-
nist. The rape of black women is an American institution fraught
with intertwined histories of race, gender, and class. Feminist critic
Dorri R. Beam insists that our patriarchal society has consistently
refused to view rape as a hate crime.73 The work of Carla Peterson
demonstrates that rape has been viewed as an act of passion (con-
sensual or not) in which the woman is somehow complicit.74
Peterson ultimately suggests that the reality of black women’s sta-
tus as unfeminine and not worthy of protection renders them vul-
nerable and more isolated in our patriarchal society.75 This reality
coalesces with Clover’s assessment of women under the constant
threat of sexual and psychological violence. Still, I suggest that the
lack of whiteness, and the protection and sympathy that whiteness
imparts, heightens the bodily threat to black women. Hazel Carby
denigrates the fact that “the institutionalized rape of black women
has never been as powerful a symbol of black oppression as the
spectacle of lynching.”76 Further, I insist that the women’s raced
blackness dampens, to stay within Clover’s lexicon, the major-
ity’s viewer’s “identificatory permeability” with a black female
rape-revenge protagonist.
Michonne embodies the classic paradigm of the rape-revenge
protagonist, for she is brutally gang raped and enacts a horrifi-
cally violent revenge upon her lead perpetrator, The Governor.77
Her attack reveals the omnipresent nature of misogyny in Western
culture, but the construction of Michonne as a black woman also
exposes the reader to the insidious nature of racism in contem-
porary Western society. The masculinity associated with her raced
blackness illustrates that her womanhood is not the only qualifier
in her subjugation. Michonne is raped to emphasize her femininity
and, later, placed in a gladiator ring replete with zombies highlight-
ing her masculinity as a fighter.78 Michonne’s intersecting identities
demand more from Clover’s rape-revenge protagonist paradigm,
for her intersections necessitate an expansion that includes race.
Michonne’s character introduction demonstrates the dangers
of incorporating black women characters while failing to truly

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 Fig. 4. Michonne in The Walking Dead issue 29, by Robert
Kirkman and Charlie Adlard (2006).

bring their complexity to the fore. Kirkman hints at the existence of

multiple facets of her character, yet chooses to sacrifice her individua-
tion to the demands of the narrative. Michonne’s racially gendered
construction marks her as rapeable, as a character whose complex
potentiality is forfeited. Michonne allows Kirkman to horrify his
readers without alienating them—something that could not have
occurred with any of Kirkman’s other (white) female characters.
Kirkman lazily relies on the creative myth of the strong black
woman to show that Michonne is “a machine” for whom sympa-
thy and complexity need not exist.79 Concurrently, Danny Boyle
grounds his characterization of Selena in stereotypes long enough
to shatter them with the development of multiple facets of her
character’s ideation.

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 Boyle’s early establishment of Selena’s characterization moors
itself in her toughness as “a strong black woman.” She is adamant
in her willingness to kill anything that threatens her life in a world
filled with the infected. She proves this tenacity in both word and
deed, explicitly explaining the rules she lives by to Jim, including
her willingness to kill him “in a heartbeat” if he becomes infected.
But Selena is simply reiterating a visually established fact, for she
has already murdered fellow survivor Mark, immediately and with-
out compunction once she discerns he has been infected. Selena’s
emotional and physical toughness is highlighted by the continuous
presence of her machete. Selena’s machete also racializes her. The
machete is not only phallic, it is a specific tool associated with peo-
ple of the tropics, people of color, and, in Britain, Africans from the
nation’s colonized diaspora.
Selena’s tough attitude and ever-present machete are not the
only characteristics that mark her as the “strong black woman”:
Jim’s (and the audience’s) expectations of her as a maternal
figure tap into the quintessential mothering often associated with
black women. Boyle deliberately constructs the initial relationship
between Jim and Selena as similar to that between a mother and
child. Selena steadily admonishes him for his curiosity in such a
dangerous environment, whether it is for his entering unknown
buildings without caution or not taking proper care of himself in
their dire circumstances. Jim is an active participant in the mater-
nal nature of their relationship; it is Selena’s name he screams for
help each time he is in danger. He even comments after she warns
him not to go into a building, “It’s like going on holiday with my
bloody Aunt.”
Still, the masculinity associated with the strong black woman
allows Selena to easily embody Clover’s paradigm of the final girl.
In complete contrast to Michonne’s Othered introduction, the
only thing highlighted by Selena’s introduction is her humanity.
Selena and Mark are introduced, saving an imperiled Jim from a
group of the infected. This movie scene is typified by a frenzied
action and a violent end to the infected as they are burned by the
purposeful explosion of a gas station. Selena runs into the frame

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 Fig. 5. Naomie Harris as Selena, 28 Days Later (2002).

completely covered in clothing as protection from the infected’s

bodily fluids. Her hair is covered, she wears glasses, and her face
is enclosed in a scarf to protect her mouth. The rest of her body is
covered in normative everyday Western wear—jeans, a top, sensi-
ble shoes, and a leather trench. This introduction not only makes
plot sense, it also shows Boyle’s willingness to subvert the Western
propensity to place characters within easily defined boxes. Mark is
just as protectively covered, and the only thing we, the audience,
can infer from the two characters is that they are human, capable,
and not infected. Selena is only gendered later, through her voice,
as she advises Jim to protect himself from the coming explosion.
Boyle also constructs Selena as relatively chaste in nature.
Once Jim and Selena meet the father-daughter unit of Frank and
Hannah, their friendship is given time to develop in the safety
of the family’s home. Selena is allowed to be innocent and sweet,
to participate in the slow building of an equal relationship with
Jim. Selena’s sexuality is multifaceted. She no longer acts like Jim’s
mother, and he no longer cries out for her to save him, for he
becomes just as self-sufficient as she. Their unusual courtship moves
forward with a chaste kiss wholly different from the overt sexuality
of Michonne. Selena is allowed the combination of sexual freedom

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 (it is she who initiates the kiss) and the chastity usually associated
with the constructed sexuality of white women (she apologizes for
her forwardness). These changes develop organically and continue
to grow.
Yet Selena complicates Clover’s paradigm of the final girl not
simply because of her race but also by being placed within a zom-
bie context. She displays inordinate amounts of mental and phys-
ical toughness, but the final fight is not hers alone. Selena does
not fight against the danger of one slasher (for example, Michael
Myers), but the threat of multiple human survivors and the
infected. She must employ the strength of the communal bonds
she has established with her new “family” to survive intact; there
is no room for individuality. Selena and Hannah use their quick
wits to defend against their attempted rapes by the unit of soldiers
they thought would provide protection. Although she has previ-
ously shown the chaste nature of her sexuality with Jim in previous
scenes, her race contributes to the soldiers’ sexual desire for her as
one of them proclaims while the others shake their head in agree-
ment: “I want the black one!”
Selena does not allow this racialized sexism deter her from sur-
vival, displaying an enduring stubbornness to live that character-
izes the final girl. She initiates affection with one soldier in order
to buy time for her to create a better plan to ensure the safety
of both herself and the young Hannah. In this situation Selena
shows a multifaceted level of intelligence and resourcefulness that
moves her beyond the broad strokes of stereotypes and allows her
to embody the trope of the final girl. Her strength is shown as she
outwits the soldiers, cares for Hannah, and stalls for time to figure
out what to do. Selena’s agency as the final girl is aided by the
external actions of Jim as he distracts the soldiers from their licen-
tious intentions. It is reestablished that Selena can protect herself,
but she is also shown being protected by Jim and working together
with Hannah to survive a mansion full of rapacious soldiers and
manic infected. Her working partnerships with her newly found
family ensure her eventual survival and allow her a safe space to
grow beyond a willingness to kill Jim “in a heartbeat.”

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 The inclusion of multifaceted black women characters such as
Michonne and Selena in horror texts not only expands the audi-
ence, it increases the potentiality of the horror genre itself. Their
very existence strengthens contemporary zombie and horror
theory by complicating the theory and making it flexible enough
to encompass and demonstrate the multiple intersections of identity
even as it broadens the audiences of the genre, ensuring its sur-
vival and relevance. It is not enough to simply include black female
characters, but creators must also make them individuated figures
woven within the major narrative. I insist that the demonstrated
dangers of normativity in horror must be challenged by interrogat-
ing the theory with the plethora of racially gendered intersections
that exist within and without the Western hegemony. Furthermore,
these practices can only be continually subverted by others cre-
ating texts that are outside of hegemonies of Hollywood and/or
major comic book publishers.80 The following chapters demon-
strate the potentiality of black women creators who produce texts
that subvert the flawed construction of the majority viewer and
create projects that revise horror on their terms. Contemporary
black women genre writers are talking back to the hegemony by
defining themselves by revising horror studies.

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 
Black Feminism and the Struggle for
Literary Respectability

What I want to advocate is that black feminist criticism be regarded

critically as a problem, not a solution, as a sign
that should be interrogated, a locus of contradictions.
—Hazel V. Carby

It is the idea that speculative fiction is somehow an indulgence or that it

is trivial that seems the most probable reason for its dismissal by literary
critics as well as its lack of appeal to most Black readers or authors.
—Jewelle Gomez

To whom are we accountable? And what social relations are in/scribing us?
—Barbara Christian

The search for Sycorax does not develop from a vacuum of black
feminism, nor can its subversive nature only be ascribed as a healing
salve for the racially gendered wounds inflicted by horror studies.
In the previous chapter, I discussed how horror criticism has failed
in articulating a complex space for black women as well as the
problematic nature of condemning black women’s characteri-
zations to manifestations of monstrosity. In this chapter, I turn
my critique to how black feminist literary theory lacks a space for

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 horror and how it proves detrimental in the recognition of the
complexities of black women creators.1 In truth, the investigation
of black women and horror is not a new concept in literature—
critics such as Sandra Jackson, Susana Morris, and Gina Wisker
have conducted strong black feminist readings of various horror
writers and films.2 Robin Means Coleman’s Horror Noire: Black
in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (2011) devotes
a significant portion of its critique to the study of black women
character constructions in film through a black feminist lens. Yet
in this chapter, I choose to focus my investigation on examining
the whys of horror criticism’s failure to establish a significant and
sustained space within black feminist literary frameworks. I inter-
rogate black feminist literary theory and its previous inability to
create and support a sustained place for critical horror inquiry.
I contend that the critical study of black women and horror has
been routinely hindered by the politics of literary respectability
that defined black feminist literary theory in the final thirty years
of the twentieth century as it struggled to be accepted into the
academy.
This chapter has three interconnected sections that build upon
the central task of establishing a historical context and argument
for the study of black women writing horror. I begin by quickly
defining black feminist literary theory by demonstrating its
nascence as an epistemological framework that informs critical
readings of texts and establishes a black women’s literary tradition.
Next, I argue that black feminist literary theory—often assumed
to be revolutionary in its purposes—has proven surprisingly con-
servative as its creators engaged in a fight for literary respectability
in academia. I end this chapter by reiterating horror criticism not
only as a valid critical framework but also as an episteme that illu-
minates new and fertile paths for reading black women’s texts.

Black Feminist Theory

Black feminist theory began in the nineteenth century, develop-
ing as a part of the abolitionist and suffragette movements and

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 Fig. 6. Clockwise from top left: Fanny Jackson Coppin, Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper, Ida Bell Wells, Anna J. Cooper, and Octavia Butler.

flourishing during Reconstruction. Activists such as Frances E. W.

Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and Fannie Jackson
Coppin chiseled a space for black women and demanded recogni-
tion, inclusion, and authority in the aforementioned sociopolitical
movements of American history. The women continuously found
themselves facing a wall of indifference. It was difficult to con-
vince others that the liberation of black womanhood would lead to
the liberation of all women. Hazel V. Carby notes that “the strug-
gle of black women to achieve adequate representation within the
women’s suffrage and temperance movements had been continu-
ally undermined by a pernicious and persistent racism.”3 A con-
sistent lack of “fit” with the white suffrage movement, as well as a
similar circumstance in the ongoing male-centered battle for the
improvement of the Negro race revealed to black women the need
to self-articulate a space that addressed the peculiar needs of black
women.
For over a century, these women hewed spaces in which
they flourished—through tenacious acts of working within the

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 interstices of cultural production—in which black women’s lived
realities were theoretically interpreted by those who actually lived
them.4 The rich advancement of black feminist theory thrived
in the final third of the twentieth century—the late 1960s through
the early 1990s—it is this era that most piques my critical inter-
est for this chapter’s study.5 This era was a renaissance for black
women, amplifying critical and textual developments, offering
multiple iterations of black feminisms across multiple disciplines
and class identities, and among multiple racial and/or gendered
communities. Most interesting, particularly for my critical inter-
ests, this epoch became heavily defined by the foothold black fem-
inism gained in the academic establishment and the (problematic)
hegemonic structures of the intelligentsia in which it came to
actively participate.6
Black feminist theory is a “cultural-political” value system that
articulates and creates “opportunities for Black women to carry out
autonomously defined investigation of self in a society which—
through racial, sexual, and class oppression—systematically denies
that our existence has been, by definition, limited.”7 Critic Deborah
McDowell insists that black women operate under a “simultane-
ity of oppressions” defined by their race, gender, and class status;
black lesbians such as Barbara Smith also came to identify sexual,
particularly queer, identities as an equitable system of oppression.8
The unique positionality of black women—afforded by the mul-
tiple facets of their identities operating together—heavily influ-
ences their lived realities and subsequently infiltrates their social,
political, and cultural output. The multiplicity that defines black
women has also led to present fissures of incongruity that are not
necessarily negative. Disagreements and tensions remain necessary
demonstrations of growth, as they highlight that black women are
not monolithic in their lived experiences and certainly not homo-
geneous in their theoretical extrapolations of those proficiencies.
Even in the midst of disagreement, I use the next section to high-
light that a situational consensus eventually began to develop
on who would be considered the leading black feminist critics
in literature as well as what were the most “appropriate” literary

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 manifestations of black feminism and—most especially—who was
writing it and who was not. It was this tenuous power structure,
defined by black feminisms’ own intelligentsia, that would consis-
tently eschew black women’s speculative literature in a misguided
fight for literary respectability.

To Become a Respectable Black Woman

I would like to take a note from Hazel V. Carby and interrogate
black feminist theory in and of itself.9 This chapter is meant to
act as a revelation, an evaluation of specific choices made by black
feminist theory’s literary leaders and their harmful effects upon
those texts that did not easily fit into the movement’s rigid goals of
highlighting “appropriate” black feminist literature. Here, I estab-
lish a contention that I expound upon in subsequent chapters—I
argue that contemporary black women horror writers are not
ahistorical; they exist within the literary tradition black feminist
criticism establishes and actively demonstrate their agility with
prominent themes of black feminist literary theory.
Black feminist literary theory has claimed to act as a sustained
critical project of subverting the Western literary hegemon—more
specifically, the Canon. The Canon Wars of the latter third of the
twentieth century sparked a movement for academic legitimacy
among many black feminist literary theorists. Other critics believe
that this fight for Canon acceptance was antithetical to black fem-
inist literary theory as a whole. At times, these antithetical beliefs
about the Canon sometimes existed within the same scholar.10
Subversive projects within the Western hegemony requires the
consolidation of capital both within and outside of its institution,
and I contend that early black feminist literary critics participated
in a concerted effort to include black women’s writings declared
as worthy of being titled literature.11 I insist that there was a suc-
cessful privileging of specific authors and readings of their works,
such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Ann Petry,
Zora Neale Hurston, and others. This section’s intervention also
centers on a harsh reality—that other writers and readings of

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 the aforementioned authors’ works that were associated with
“lower” subgenres such as horror, science fiction, and fantasy were
actively ignored, passively neglected, and/or marginalized to spaces
in which they were not sufficiently nurtured.
The overarching questions of this section remain who made
these choices and what were the specific parameters of deter-
mining whose writing was worthy of highlighting and pushed as
exemplars of black women’s literature? To properly answer these
questions, I find it necessary to return to an early incarnation of
black feminist theory—the social movement of black women’s
respectability politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Respectability politics are a set of social, cultural, and
political mores that construct and demonstrate the virtue of black
womanhood through race work—the uplift of the black com-
munity toward a more equitable standing of blacks in America.
Deborah Gray White argues that race work “became the means
wherein black women could change their image, and from their
point of view, the uplift of women was the means of uplifting the
race.”12 Black clubwomen eagerly took on Mary Church Terrell’s
charge to “carry [their] burden in the heat of the day.”13 It was a bur-
den steeped in Western constructions of femininity, for at its base
was the insistence that the black woman’s primary source of socio-
cultural strength was in the home. The leaders of the movement
modeled classic ideals of feminine refinement for their followers.
Terrell is described by one observer attending her speech on mod-
ern black womanhood as appointed in a “pink evening dress and
long white gloves, with her hair beautifully done,” and her bearing
was deemed “regal.”14 Yet the women were always ready and willing
to do the work necessitated by the demands of their community as
more radical clubwomen successfully advocated for black women
to move beyond the demands of the domestic sphere, insisting that
“a woman’s place is where she is needed and where she fit in.”15 I
choose to connect the power of black women’s respectability to the
critical work of leading black feminist literary scholars of the late
twentieth century.

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 The Politics of Literary Respectability
At its most base level, black literary feminism grounds itself in
(re)discovering and celebrating the rich histories black women of
earlier generations.16 The relationship between Alice Walker and
Zora Neale Hurston, for example, demonstrates the crux of these
ideas. In her essay collection In Search of Our Mother’s Daughters
(1983), Walker notes a particular kinship with Hurston and ana-
lyzes the looming influence of Hurston’s life and literature in her
own development as an artist. Walker’s subsequent acts demand-
ing Hurston’s placement into the Literary Canon exemplify the
actions of multiple black feminist writers and literary critics of the
1970s and 1980s.
The initial move in the grand project of bringing black women
into the Canon was the establishment of a literary tradition of
black women. The young critics who would lead the incorporation
of this strategy became well versed in the literature, race work,
and respectability politics of the black clubwomen from the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many early novels were
written and published by the very same leaders and participants
of the club movement. The authors of works examined by later
black feminists read as a who’s who of the club movement dis-
cussed in the previous section. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black
Women 1860–1960 (1987) by Mary Helen Washington features an
entire section—Part Two—analyzing the fiction of prominent
clubwomen Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline E. Hopkins,
and Fannie Barrier Williams.17 In Washington’s critical introduc-
tion to Part Two, she exhibits confident knowledge of the shadow
of the Cult of True Womanhood as the women “enlisted their fic-
tion in the battle to counter the negative images of blacks and
women.”18 Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) is once again
encountered in Barbara Christian’s groundbreaking critical text
Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976
(1980). Christian contextualizes the importance of Harper’s text by
highlighting that it “so clearly delineates the relationship between

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 the images of black women held at large in society and the novelist’s
struggle to refute these images.”19 Christian clearly recognizes the
politic of black women’s respectability embedded within the nov-
el’s social critiques. Similarly, the names of prominent advocates of
respectability populate multiple chapters of the foundational text
of black feminism, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men,
But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (1982). This text,
edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith,
gathers the critiques, bibliographies, and suggested black feminist
course curricula by highly influential scholars theorizing and prac-
ticing black feminist theory across disciplines. Patricia Bell Scott’s
“Selected Bibliography on Black Feminism” suggests Anna Julia
Cooper’s A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South
(1892) as well as proto-feminist Maria W. Stewart’s Productions of
Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1832) and prominent activist Mary Church
Terrell’s A Colored Woman in a White World (1940). Gloria T. Hull
contributes a chapter that focuses on the life and works of Alice
Dunbar-Nelson. The scholars discussed above—Barbara Smith,
Mary Helen Washington, Barbara Christian, and Gloria T. Hull,
as well as a few others—rose to prominence in part with their crit-
ical work on the clubwomen writers of the previous century.20
Respectability advocates vowed to revise the negative images
of black womanhood as both writers and doers of the word in all
aspects, writing fiction as well as fighting for suffrage. I suggest
that the clubwomen’s commitment to authorship, as well as their
politics of respectability, impressed the black feminists research-
ing their works almost a century later. I do not believe that the
late twentieth-century scholars began living lives of utmost deco-
rum with “not a hint of impropriety.”21 But I do insist that pro-
to-black feminists’ long-term strategies for the incorporation of
black women into mainstream America constructed a blueprint
for their descendants’ approach for placing black women writers
in the Canon by designing a new interpretation of respectability
politics, inspiring a politics of literary respectability.
Literary respectability consists of a fluid set of practices—
heavily influenced by the respectability politics of the club

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 movement—incorporated by leading scholars of black feminist lit-
erature with the goal of collapsing the gendered racist and classist
walls of the literary Canon. Literary respectability, derived from
the respectability politics of their foremothers, was successfully
integrated into contemporary academia by countering the negative
images of black women in literature and presenting evidence of
the historical invisibility of black women writers by proving their
existence throughout American literary history.
The solution to the invisibility of black women’s literature in
university halls has been the development a cohesive black femi-
nist literary theoretical framework as well as the procurement and
development of black feminist scholars adept at reading, writing,
and—most important—publishing their work on black women’s
fiction in scholarly journals and presses. Barbara Smith highlights
“the necessity for nonhostile and perceptive analysis of works writ-
ten by persons outside of the ‘mainstream’ of white/male cultural
rule.”22 Smith demands the creation of a “space” for the “explora-
tion of Black women’s lives and the creation of consciously Black
woman-identified art” while emphasizing the lack of political
power that exists within the academy to make these spaces a schol-
arly reality.23 In truth, Toward a Black Feminist Criticism is a call for
the development and—most important—the organization of the
political prowess to carve out as much space as necessary. In the
end, the work is what matters, “for books to be real and remem-
bered they have to be talked about. For books to be understood
they must be examined in such a way that the basic intentions of
the writers are at least considered.”24
Barbara Christian chose to combat the lack of academic sup-
port and collegiality when scholars—particularly those on the ten-
ure track—began to answer Smith’s call to read, write, and publish
criticism centering on black women’s creative writing. Filled with
a renewed commitment to the study of black women’s creative fic-
tion, Christian found a general sense of intransigence among her
colleagues toward her research plan. Fellow scholars “warned me
that I was going to ruin my academic career by studying an insig-
nificant, some said nonexistent, body of literature.”25 Christian

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 met true resistance in attempting to publish this work in schol-
arly journals and by university presses and found herself against
the dangerously antiquated ideals of the academy: “Practically all
academic presses as well as trade presses commented that my sub-
ject was not important—that people were not interested in black
women writers.”26 The fight to establish black feminist literary crit-
icism in academia was—and remains—a long, hard slog through
academic detritus and pushback against the limited boxes white
women, black men, and particularly black women’s literature and
criticism were allowed to occupy. Difficult decisions were made to
ensure forward movement and protect what small area the scholars
hewed for themselves, their subjects, and their work.
Black feminist literary scholars found themselves in the unen-
viable position of combating the troubling literary norms of the
Canon even as they were committed to employing literary respect-
ability to gain entry. Scholars began by questioning the very merits of
being included, deliberating if “the thoroughly rationalist approach
of European intellectual discourse might have seemed . . . to be too
one-dimensional, too narrow.”27 The critics vowed to change the
rules even as they evoked them, insisting that “black feminist crit-
icism needed to break some of the restricted forms, personalize
the staid language associated with the critic—forms that seemed
opposed to the works of the writers as well as the culture they
came from.”28 The scholars wanted to revolutionize the Canon
from within, but the cost of entrance heavily mitigated the feasi-
bility of true and substantial change. There existed a hyperaware-
ness of the potential blowback of literary respectability as these
authorities of black feminist thought were certainly aware of the
pitfalls of compromise as they set guidelines to acknowledge the
power of difference between the Western and the African as well
as all the possibilities in-between: “All African-American texts are
not the same. There are standards, not always the same as those
upheld in the West, that African Americans hold to in determin-
ing what is the good and the beautiful.”29 Those standards, who
would construct them and how they would be measured, created a

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 space where the speculative could be dismissed and ignored by the
literary theorists of that time.

Sycorax Haunts Black Feminist Literature and Theory

In this final section I begin to grapple with the legacy that black fem-
inism leaves for future scholars of literature, particularly this project’s
focus upon horror in black women’s creative works. The following
chapters push past Christian’s self-critiquing inquiry, “Can we think
about how narrowly defined our own definition of scholarship might
be?,” to conduct a sustained scholarly pursuit of the dynamics of black
woman–authored horror texts.30 In the previous section, I articulated
how a politics of literary respectability developed and defined itself
within black feminist literary scholarship. I now want to center the
specific implications the frameworks had upon the potentiality of
horror scholarship in black feminist criticism.
I contend that the expectations set by the initial creators of
black feminist criticism failed to consider the speculative fiction of
black women writers as well as speculative analytical frameworks
for those works they chose to privilege.31 Speculative fiction simply
did not fit with the critically thoughtful project of promoting the
study of black women’s fiction as valid academic research paths.
Scholar Mae G. Henderson agrees, declaring: “There was certainly
a privileging of certain writers among the 70s and 80s black literary
feminists—after all, the project was then to establish a canon—or,
at the very least, work to introduce black women’s texts into an
expanded canon.”32 The frameworks’ leading scholars ignored the
political potential of genre fiction—especially horror fiction and its
themes—because of two interrelated reasons. First, they failed to
recognize the intersectional potential of speculative fiction because
of its assumed lack of gravitas. This action led to the dismissing of
speculative and/or horror writers and theoretical frameworks active
during the 1980s. Finally, horror literature lacked respectability—
the scholars also did not want to be associated with the already
ghettoized status horror possessed within Canon politics.

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 A narrow focus upon depicting the “lived realities” of black
women by the early creators of black feminism left no room for the
speculative, a genre of fiction rarely associated with either blackness
or feminism. Horror author and critic Jewelle Gomez—a black
lesbian feminist who sat on the editorial board of CONDITIONS,
a lesbian literary journal—has always lamented this willful blind-
ness: “It is the idea that speculative fiction is somehow an indul-
gence or that it is trivial that seems the most probable reason for
its dismissal by literary critics as well as its lack of appeal to most
Black readers or authors.”33 It is the incorrect assumption that
speculative fiction could not forward the project of privileging
black woman–centered literature that proved detrimental to the
overall politics of literary respectability. It is not as if black women
speculative writers did not exist within their contemporary com-
munity, for the speculative works by black women really began to
make an impact in the 1980s, just as black feminist theory was
being established in the academy. In her essay “Speculative Fiction
and Black Lesbians” (1993), Gomez reads the writing of Cheryl
Clarke—another politically active black feminist contemporary—
and notes how her work incorporates themes of escape and slavery
but also “insists on tying the past to the future.”34 Gomez expands
her analysis to Michelle Parkerson and Barbara Buford. Gomez
not only aided in privileging black women speculative writers, she
was a poet and novelist in her own right, as seen in the publish-
ing of her horror novel, The Gilda Stories (1990). The writing was
nascent—just as the whole of black women’s literature was at the
time—but the knowledge and the works existed; they were either
ignored or actively silenced. An interview with Jewelle Gomez
reveals that Barbara Christian—Gomez’s friend and colleague—
initially discouraged Gomez’s topical focus on a black woman who
was also a vampire.35
The most egregious sin of black feminist literary scholars at the
time remains their lack of engagement with the best-selling black
woman writer of all time, Octavia Butler.36 Walker, Christian, and
other scholars decried the lack of published black women writers
to study even as they failed to acknowledge a rising literary star

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 who fit into their stated needs. In his essay “Why Blacks Should
Read (and Write) Science Fiction” (2000), a direct reply to his ear-
lier indictment of racism that populated science fiction in “Why
Blacks Don’t Read Science Fiction” (1978), black science fiction
writer Charles Saunders notes Octavia Butler coming to the
fore in 1978 and reaching the heights of popularity in the 1980s.37
Saunders highlights her “readability” as he supposes she is “possibly
attracting some of the same readers who enjoy Toni Morrison.”38 I
further Saunders’s supposition by questioning if Butler succeeded
in attracting the readers of Toni Morrison, why was she then
unable to attract black feminist scholars starved for black wom-
en’s creative fiction? My question necessitates a return to Gomez’s
rebuke of black literary theory—and subsequently black feminist
literary theory—to read speculative fiction as trivial. Gomez places
the rejection of Butler and writers of her ilk squarely on the shoul-
ders of literary critics, and “the need by some writers and readers
for Black literature to serve a higher purpose—that is, to address
racism directly—sometimes leads Black writers to ignore, to some
extent, other issues.”39 The early scholars—misguided by literary
respectability politics—missed fertile opportunities to engage with
black woman–centered works authored by black women because
of their inability to recognize the layers of nuanced identities per-
meating the works of Butler and her speculative sistren.
The prejudices against speculative fiction also account for the
discounting of fertile research opportunities in the already privi-
leged literary fiction of writers such as Toni Morrison and Gloria
Naylor.40 Earlier analyses of their texts focused on the lived reali-
ties of their central characters or were given the misnomer of mag-
ical realism. Magical realism is a theoretical framework gleaned
from Latin American epistemes in which “we find the transfor-
mation of the common and the everyday into the awesome and
the unreal. It is predominantly an art of surprises. Time exists in
a kind of timeless fluidity and the unreal happens as part of real-
ity.”41 I am certainly not declaring magical realism an inept theo-
retical concept—what I am stressing is that the framework does
not fully address the racially gendered needs of black women’s

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 creative fiction. It is a theoretical hand-me-down that fits black
women’s literature, but not very well—it is in dire need of tailoring
to its specific literary themes. I suggest that a racially gendered
framework, grounded in horror theory, provides awesome research
opportunities to contemporary black feminists.
I recognize that I am actively privileging horror theory over
well-established and widely accepted analyses of magical realism
as the cause of the inexplicable occurrences present in classic black
feminist literature. I am not suggesting that horror replace all the
other frameworks the following writers have been read through—I
am simply arguing for the recognition and use of horror studies
as a valuable framework in which to read these works. But black
feminist theorists have consistently overlooked horror’s almost
commonsensical potential to explore the marvelous in our schol-
arly readings of black women’s fiction. At its most base level, Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (1987) is a ghost story. True, themes of genera-
tional trauma, chattel slavery, and mother-daughter relationships
are prevalent, but they all occur within the framework of a pro-
totypical ghost story. Charles Saunders muses: “the strong super-
natural element in Beloved could easily qualify it as fantasy, or, at
the very least horror in the mode of Henry James’ The Turn of the
Screw.”42 The first eight to ten years of literary analysis of Beloved
focused on ghosts and hauntings, but only spoke of these super-
natural elements in terms of the “horrific” effects of slavery upon
the psyche of the formerly enslaved. There were no readings of
the ghosts and the possessed as traditional elements of horror and
how Morrison employs them specifically within a black feminist
dynamic—it remains incredible that so much genre potentiality
was bypassed by the very creators of the discipline. Similarly, Gloria
Naylor’s Mama Day (1989) has yet to be fully analyzed within a
horror framework. Often, black feminist studies of Naylor’s work
have focused on African American folklore, the power of Miranda
Day as a conjure woman, and, lately, the presence of hoodoo spells
and curses. There exists a lack of consideration of connecting the
conjure woman to the Mambo in the sense of exploring the deep
elements of horror that exist within Naylor’s groundbreaking work.

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 Shakespearean themes suffuse Naylor’s text—there is even the
presence of the magical island of Willow Springs, not unlike
the island ruled formerly ruled by Sycorax in The Tempest (1518).
Once again, the absent presence of Sycorax and her potentiality
as a black feminist figure of horror are ignored. Only this time
women who reflect her own appearance disregard Shakespeare’s
black witch.
Horror was actively ignored as a research possibility because
of the ghettoized status it held within the literary arts. Scholars
were already wrestling with the vagaries of demanding that aca-
demic institutions include black woman–authored literature; they
did not need the added taint of horror. Horror works—such as
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as well as Edgar Allen Poe’s The
Raven (1845)—are included in the literary Canon, but each has
been ameliorated by the milder, more acceptable term as Gothic
literature. Finally, the scholars at the time did not want to be asso-
ciated with B-movie schlock. The struggle for academic acceptance
took place in the waning years of Blaxploitation films centering on
unreal characterizations of black women such as Tamara Dobson
in Cleopatra Jones (1973) and Pam Grier in Foxy Brown (1974).
Blackness and horror were still being heavily associated with
superfluous and culturally problematic films such as Blacula (1972)
and Scream Blacula Scream (1973).
In the end, Sycorax haunts black feminist theory just as force-
fully as she haunts the mainstream horror explored in the first
chapter of this work. Luckily, we can learn from the mistakes of
early black feminist critics and use their guidance to fill the lacu-
nae they left unexplored for their own political reasons. In the
following chapters, I take note from the revisionary potential of
black literary feminisms to place black women at the center of my
inquiry into horror. This project builds upon Barbara Christian’s
acceptance that subsequent scholars would commit to projects that
may prove “incomprehensible to our sense of what scholarly enter-
prises should be about.”43 In exposing such a lacuna in black femi-
nist literature, the next two chapters are committed to articulating
holistic theories of black woman–authored horror texts.

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 
Black Women Writing Fluid Fiction
An Open Challenge to Genre Normativity

What we need to learn is what are useful and efficient

distinctions and what are inefficient and useless.
—Samuel Delaney, “The Second Law of Thermodynamics”

They take you and put you in one ghetto over another. You can
be a horror writer, you can be a fantasy writer, you can be a science
fiction writer—but you can’t be them all. You have to choose one.
—Chesya Burke

This chapter discusses the fluid lines between horror, fantasy,

science fiction, and speculative fiction and how contemporary
black women genre writers exploit the obfuscation of these lines
to articulate the simultaneity of oppressions that uniquely affect
black women. Weakened distinctions between science fiction, fan-
tasy, and horror create a genre confusion concerning black female
authors because few to none have taken the time to explore how
black women writers worry the lines between these genres to cre-
ate a blend of horror/fantasy/science fiction that is specific to their
themes and analytical needs.1 Confusion remains on this subject in
mainstream literature, and the complex identities of black women

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 often complicate an already labyrinthine genre discussion in writ-
ing what I term “fluid fiction.”
I analyze black women writer’s participation in genre liter-
ature throughout this chapter in three distinct parts. I begin by
exploring the seeping lines in contemporary genre definitions of
science fiction, fantasy, and horror and attempt to discern how
black women writers refuse to squeeze themselves into these lim-
ited ideals. Next, I dispute the placement of these black women
creators into the categories of speculative fiction and Afrofuturism
while arguing for a subgenre that is explicitly black and female.
I end this chapter with my contention that many contemporary
black women genre writers exploit the clouded genre lines for their
particular literary means by writing fluid fiction as elucidated in
Nalo Hopkinson’s Sister Mine (2013).

Genre Confusion
Confusion about genre definitions is not a new concept, and it
certainly is not specific to black women who write genre fiction.
The Library of Congress’s Collections Policy on genre literature
claims “the distinctions between science fiction and various other
subgenres of fantasy [under which they include horror] are indeed
blurred at times and usually artificial.”2 In fact, “many authors in
the genre frequently cross these artificial barriers in mid-work.”3
I discussed the difficulties associated with defining the horror
genre in the Introduction, and I choose to continue using the sim-
plistic, yet nonspecific definition offered by horror studies pioneer
Robin Wood, “When Normativity Is Threatened by a Monster
(or the Other).”4 Though problematic—as all genre definitions
are—Wood’s statement offers the flexibility needed to create a
large-scale discussion of genre. Though the following discussion
is, at times, frustratingly amorphous with increasing amounts of
pliability between the definitions, it remains necessary in order
to approach the pressing need for my fluid fiction framework
presented later in this chapter—a theory that brings a crucial

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 specificity applicable to the genre writings of contemporary black
women.
The Library of Congress explicitly states that fantasy “usually
requires a willing suspension of disbelief.”5 The document contin-
ues with a description of characteristics of subgenres of fantasy:

. [They] adapt, rework, or provide an alternate telling of myth or

folktale.
. [They] involve an alternate reality or alternate universe.
. [They] rely on a displacement of time or space.
. [They] make use of elements of the horrific, supernatural, para-
normal, or the occult.

It is clear that the Library of Congress has chosen to incorporate

a popular critical organizing tactic of determining fantasy to be a
metagenre under which includes both horror and science fiction.
Though a sensible organization of these three genres, it remains
problematic in its equivocal lack of clarity.
Such an imprecise definition of fantasy allows for the above
criteria to also define the horror genre. Many horror texts—such as
F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), John Landis’s An American
Werewolf in London (1981), and George Romero’s Night of the Living
Dead (1968)—adapt and revise myths and folktales of vampires,
werewolves, and zombies. Authors such as Laurell K. Hamilton—
the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series (1993–), Jonathan
Mayberry—the Joe Ledger series (2009–), and Christopher
Farnsworth—the Nathanial Cade series (2010–) create alternate
realities in which demons, vampires, werewolves, fairies, and zom-
bies exist and must be bargained with and/or destroyed. Stephen
King’s dome found in Under the Dome: A Novel (2009), the sewer
system from It (1987), and the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1977)
are all physical structures that pause, disrupt, or conflate both
time and space. Finally, elements of the supernatural, the para-
normal, and the occult populate the horror genre—a splendid
example is the trope of the haunted house. Stephen King’s
Salem’s Lot (1975), Tananarive Due’s The Good House (2003), and

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 Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror (1977) are all novels in which a
house becomes the embodiment of evil.
The document continues on to define science fiction by build-
ing upon its already tenuous organization of the fantasy genre—
here, nebulous lines become even hazier. The Library of Congress
defines science fiction by stating that it contains all of the criteria
listed above to define fantasy as well as the following:

. It is speculative in nature.
. It assumes change as a given.
. It projects a story-line into the future or into an alternative reality
or history.
. It explores a problem in technology, culture, philosophy, etc.
beyond its current state.
. It presents an atmosphere of scientific credibility regardless of the
reality.6

Next, the text initiates a short list of what science fiction is not—
or at least some of it is not. The policy insists that not all science
fiction:

. Takes place in the future.

. Involves space travel.
. Describes technology beyond current reality.
. Deals with alien cultures.7

The policy finally notes: “these elements are common in this sub-
genre [of science fiction] and uncommon outside of it,”8 thereby
undercutting whatever strengths of delineation attempted in the
establishment of the above criteria. It is necessary to note that the
definitions outlined by the Library of Congress are not incorrect;
it is simply that the blended nature of these three genres—science
fiction, fantasy, and horror—increases the difficulty in enunciating
a consistent definition of one of the genres.9
These genre definitions are deeply entangled with many the-
orists, writers, and fans attempting to unpack these terms by

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 constructing their discussions against each other to highlight
what each subgenre is not. Creator, writer, and producer of The
Twilight Zone (1959–1964) television series Rod Serling discloses:
“fantasy is the impossible made probable [while] science fiction
is the improbable made possible.”10 Multiple Hugo and Nebula
award-winning author Arthur C. Clarke maintains: “science fic-
tion is something that could happen—but you usually wouldn’t
want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn’t happen—though
you often only wish that it could.”11 Note that horror is emitted
from these discussions, denoting its ghettoized status even among
the literati of the somewhat marginalized genres of science fiction
and fantasy. Each of these sincere attempts to allocate meaning to
science fiction and fantasy reaches the broadly amorphous nature
of Robin Woods’s declaration of horror as “when normativity is
threatened by a monster.” Again, I insist that the explanations of
Serling, Clarke, and Woods are not incorrect—but each leaves the
inquirer wanting more. Whether it is more specificity, more clarity,
or more examples is unclear—but as both a critic and a fan, I am
left somewhat bereft.
Other critics ascribe delineations of the genres by going deeper
into each genre and constituting explications that become increas-
ingly more specific even as they multiply the obscurity that accom-
panies these terms. The division of science fiction into “hard science
fiction” and “soft science fiction” appears deceptively useful, but it
ignores the seeping lines of crossover that remain common within
the genre itself. Hard science fiction encompasses the use of one
or more of the natural or physical sciences such as physics, chem-
istry, biology, geology, and astronomy. Soft science fiction deals
with the science of humans and their behavior such as psychology,
sociology, anthropology, and political science. Nevertheless, most
science fiction texts are a cogent blend of both the hard and the
soft sciences.
Stanley Kubrick’s iconic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968) craftily begins with a focus on the hard sciences—as astro-
nauts initiate travel to Jupiter amid the stark, white minimalism
of hard surfaces and furniture created through man’s scientific

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 advancements. There is an emphasis on the artificial genius of the
mission’s spaceship, the life-saving protection provided by space
suits as the astronauts complete scientific experiments and prepare
for the initial visit to such a faraway planet. The camera captures
a mise-en-scene that is an orgy of structures and products made
through breakthroughs in chemistry and biology—even as the
mission itself is made possible by man’s advancements in phys-
ics and astronomy to map out the geology of an alien landscape.
Perhaps the film’s most auspicious exemplar of man’s scientific
genius is the creation and inclusion of HAL 9000—the artificial
intelligence program tasked with “perhaps the greatest responsi-
bility of any single mission element. You’re the brain and central
nervous system of the ship.”12 Yet it is the study of human behav-
iors—the softer sciences—that provides the plot catalyst for the
exploration of the film’s central themes.
HAL 9000 evolves from a clever artificial intelligence appa-
ratus into what he refers to as a “conscious entity”—he becomes
“human.”13 It is HAL’s misreading of humanity—for he can
only experience humans through the distorted lens of the hard
sciences—that originates in his creators’ inability to sufficiently elu-
cidate the intricacies of humanness investigated in softer sciences
such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology. HAL’s imbalance
elicits his problematic augmentation of humanity—leading HAL
to murder all but one of the ship’s crew members, all in his inscru-
table allegiance to completing the mission. HAL’s inability to place
humanity within its proper perspective tenders his nonchalance in
overruling human authority and devaluing human life. Thus, 2001:
A Space Odyssey acts as a meditation upon the need for both hard
and soft sciences to actualize a great science fiction story.
Arthur C. Clarke, one of the founding fathers of contempo-
rary science fiction, craftily expands its boundaries by revising the
understanding of science. Clarke believes that “magic’s just science
that we don’t understand yet” while insisting that “any sufficiently
advanced technology is undistinguishable from magic.”14 Clarke’s
reading of science instigates my discussion of the permeability of
the walls between science fiction and fantasy—for magic often

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 substitutes science as the purveyor of knowledge and solution to
plot predicaments. Still, even fantasy has been subject to multiple
internal divisions and squabbles similar to those that plague sci-
ence fiction.
Most critics attempt to define fantasy by separating it from sci-
ence fiction and horror before articulating the genre on its own
terms. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy declares that fantasy “continues
to lack the specificity of science fiction”; rather, fantasy is more of
a structure, a form that differs from horror, “which is named solely
for the affect it is intended to produce.”15 In their introduction
to The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (2012), editors
Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn coalesce many differing
ideas of fantasy to set the stage for their edited volume. Fantasy
writer and critic Brian Attebery proposes that “we view fantasy
as a group of texts that share, to a greater degree or other a clus-
ter of common tropes which may be objects but which may also
be narrative techniques.”16 James and Mendlesohn acquiesce that
the particulars of those tropes add up to what they term “‘a fuzzy
set’ of fantasy,” acknowledging the continuously murky nature
of defining fantasy in particular and genre fiction at large.17 The
introduction continues by conceding to the idea that all fantasy
texts are in conversation with each other even though a consensus
on its canon and even its components fails to exist. The following
consideration reinforces Sylvia Kelso’s assessment that “what can
now, ironically, be called ‘traditional modern fantasy’—the work
of Tolkien, Eddings, and Jordan—is distinguished, in a ‘shopping
list,’ by the scenario of a pre-industrial secondary world, with the
central mythos of a Quest and/or bildungsroman, and the equally
frequent pattern of ‘There and Back Again.’”18
Yet the failure to form a consensus does not prevent noted
scholars from valiant attempts to delineate their beloved genre.
In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), coeditor John Clute defines
the genre of “full fantasy” as “the story of an earned passage
from BONDAGE—via a central RECOGNITION of what
has been revealed and what is about to happen, and which may
involve a profound METAMORPHOSIS of protagonist or

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 world (or both)—into the EUCASTROPHE, where marriages
may occur, just governance fertilize the barren LAND, and
there is a HEALING.”19 I want to follow through Clute’s the-
matic definition as I examine N. K. Jemisin’s fantasy novel The
Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010), the first entry of her Kingdom
trilogy. Jemisin is particularly noteworthy because she seam-
lessly coalesces classic European fantasy tropes with specifically
non-Western cosmologies even as she centers the journey of a
young black woman in her novel. Kingdoms revolves around its
protagonist, Yeine Darr, a tribal chieftain eventually thrust into
the dangerous politics of castle intrigue as she is invited to live
in the city of Sky ruled by her grandfather, the King. Yeine finds
herself a pawn between the power struggles between her royal
family members and the pertinacious gods they have enslaved.
Yeine’s journey begins in BONDAGE, for she is the chieftain of
the Darre people, a physically, socially, and economically margin-
alized matriarchy excommunicated by the larger society because
her brown father fell in love and married the princess of the most
powerful tribe in the land, the Arameri, bringing her to willfully
abdicate her throne. Clute emphasizes that the initial stage of
BONDAGE “is normally signaled in fantasy by WRONGNESS,
by a sense that the world as a whole has gone askew, that the story
of things has been occluded.”20 In Kingdom, the WRONGNESS
comes with the death of Yeine’s mother, Kinneth, and her suspi-
cion that her mother was murdered on the order of her spurned
grandfather, Dekarta, head of the Arameri family and ruler of the
Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. The journey from BONDAGE to
RECOGNITION also hinges upon THINNING, a “dangerous
and painful . . . fading away of beingness.”21 THINNING “may
manifest itself through the loss of magic or the slow death of the
gods . . . or an Amnesia (the protagonist’s, or the world’s) about the
true nature of the self or history . . . or of any of the consequences
of the rule of a Dark Lord, whose diktats almost inevitably repre-
sent an estranging parody of just governance.”22 Multiple aspects
of THINNING occur once Yeine accepts Dekarta’s invitation to
the city of Sky in which he declares Yeine the heir to his kingdom.

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 Dekarta’s decree places her in danger from her twin cousins and
from the enslaved gods planning an insurrection to the rule of the
Skyfather, the god of light, the victorious god who condemns his
brother, Nahadoth, the embodiment of darkness, and his fellow
gods to be the slaves of his beloved Arameri. Yeine loses a sure
sense of self to the castle intrigue of so many interested parties
out to ensure her demise. Yeine comes to realize that she is quickly
being groomed as a sacrifice to the Skyfather by Dekarta to ensure
his rule and as a sacrifice to reincarnate as the goddess Enefa—
who rules over dawn and twilight—and the only hope to restore
balance to the universe and remove the chains of bondage from the
gods, ensuring the kingdom’s survival. Yeine becomes a symbol, her
individuality and her very agency as a human being wither as she
realizes that she may only be a vessel for Enefa—her conscious was
placed in an amnesic state within baby Yeine to ensure her survival
beyond the Skyfather’s grasp. The final aspect of THINNING
occurs with the realization that the Skyfather, the god of light and
clarity, truly embodies the Darkness of the world, not Nahodoth.
The Skyfather has hidden the dark nature of his crimes within
the brilliance of his light, blinding all—particularly the morally
compromised Arameri—to his evil and parodic sense of justice.
RECOGNITION describes the moment at which the protago-
nist gazes upon the thinned world and achieves clarity of her jour-
ney’s true purpose. It is only after this moment of transformative
RECOGNITION that HEALING can occur, a transition often
accomplished through literal METAMORPHOSIS.23 Yeine’s
RECOGNITION comes with the realization that she was never
meant to be an heir, only a necessary sacrifice to the Skyfather
that allows true succession to the throne to occur. The moment
of HEALING reveals itself with Yeine’s acceptance and self-
sacrifice as she dies to become the goddess Enefa. Yeine’s literal
METAMORPHOSIS into Enefa restores the balance of power
between the world’s light and dark for she regains her place as
transition itself, the dusk and the dawn. My reading of both 2001:
A Space Odyssey and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms reveals both
the intense structure of genres as well as their fecund flexibility

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 that sustains their popular and scholarly success. I use the next
section to trouble the potentialities of such flexibility.

The Lacks of Speculative Fiction

The inception of theories such as intersectionality, multiplici-
ties, and hybridity in the latter part of the twentieth century has
led to a general acceptance of the difficulties in delineating clear
definitions for the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
These concessions generated a critical space that embraced the
genres’ incertitude, resulting in a new genre, speculative fiction.
Speculative fiction has two working definitions in contemporary
genre literature studies, with neither fully encapsulating its true
intricacies. Speculative fiction began as a subgenre under science
fiction literature and film that concentrates on “what if, if only,
and if this goes on”—that is, to speculate.24 In its contemporary
iteration, speculative fiction has developed into a lackadaisical
umbrella term for any fiction remotely related to genre literature.
Another early scholar of contemporary science fiction, Robert
Heinlein, views speculative fiction as including “all forms of fan-
tastic fiction . . . science fiction, fantasy, and horror, supernatural
fiction, apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction, utopian and dys-
topian, alternative history, and magic realism.”25 Speculative fic-
tion’s development into a catchall term for any work that mixes the
genres of science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror proves its lack of
usefulness for examining black women’s genre fiction. Speculative
fiction’s unhindered growth and development power this chapter’s
urgent need to create and highlight a more distinct framework for
reading black women’s genre fiction.
The attempt to define speculative literature eventually becomes
a question of what is not speculative fiction.26 N. E. Lilly, from
the speculative e-zine Green Tentacles, pushes the boundaries of
speculative fiction even further by stating: “Speculative Fiction . . .
also addresses works that are not science fiction, fantasy, or hor-
ror, yet don’t rightly belong in other genres . . . [such as] fiction
that includes Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and Fantastic fiction.

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 It also may include other genres such as mysteries, Alternate
Histories [such as Steampunk] and Historical Fiction.”27 Scholar
Susanna Morris laments that speculative fiction “has largely been
(mis)understood as a genre written only by whites (mostly men)
about whites (again, mostly men).”28 Poststructuralism shattered
many misunderstandings about speculative fiction as non-white,
non-male, non-heterosexual, and non-middle-class authors were
reminded that the authors of science fiction/fantasy/horror con-
sistently failed to make a space for Others in the literary ghetto in
which their own work had been marginalized. It is within such a
harsh reality that speculative fiction developed its allure, for it “is
a term which includes all literature that takes place in a universe
slightly different from our own. In all its forms it gives authors
the ability to ask relevant questions about our society in a way
that would prove provocative in more mainstream forms.”29 The
inclusive nature of speculative fiction—particularly its ability to
highlight the difficult social issues in a seemingly nonthreatening
way—appeals to those who have been rendered outsiders in a lit-
erary framework constructed by those already excluded from the
realm of literature. The umbrella of speculative fiction discounts no
one; it accepts the gendered, the queered, the poor, and the weird-
est of the weirdos. Yet I insist that in speculative fiction’s sweeping
inclusivity, the literary projects of black women become lost.
Black women authors do not currently eschew the label of specu-
lative fiction even as I present its growing inadequacy as an efficacious
descriptor of their work. Many of the black women discussed in this
work have proudly published under its banner—Nalo Hopkinson,
Tananarive Due, Nnedi Okorafor, N. K. Jemisin, Chesya Burke,
and Kiini Ibura Salaam, to name a few. In a 1998 interview,
Hopkinson declares: “I write fantasy (actually, I say ‘speculative
fiction,’ because my work includes elements of science fiction, fan-
tasy, dark fantasy, horror and magic realism).”30 Prominent black
feminist critics such as Gwendolyn Pough and Yolanda Hood
devoted an entire issue of the Femspec journal to speculative black
women in June 2005.31 In their introduction, Pough and Hood
focused on the need for black women to “create speculative visions

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 of the world . . . [particularly given] black women’s actual posi-
tions in the ‘real’ world as women who experience varying degrees
of sexism, racism, and classism, and homophobia.”32 Most espe-
cially, the scholars propose the question, “How do current Black
women speculate, rewrite, re-visit, and re-envision history in ways
that connect them to Black women’s legacies of struggle?,” as the
most important theme explored in the issue.33 Pough and Hood’s
privileging of how black women “rewrite, re-visit, and re-envision”
speculative fiction in their works elucidates exactly why specula-
tive fiction proves inadequate. The very term “speculative” leaves
the peculiar particularities of black women genre writers wanting,
for it fails to explicitly acknowledge the deliberate nature of black
women writers in blurring genre lines to articulate their “legacies
of struggle” as dreams of the past/present/future.34 Speculative fic-
tion too readily glosses over author Nnedi Okorafor’s insistence
that “there is a method, purpose and realness to my madness. It is
not fantasy for fantasy’s sake.”35
Sandra Jackson and Julie Moody-Freeman’s editorial work in
a May 2009 special issue of the journal African Identities paral-
lels the ground-breaking work of Pough and Hood in Femspec by
focusing on “The Black Imagination” and science fiction. Jackson
and Moody-Freeman are perceptive in their recognition of the his-
torical appeal of science fiction’s, speculative fiction’s, and fantasy’s
ability to act as social and political commentary on the Western
world, particularly in their ability to highlight “geo-politics and
conflict between nation-states as well as those between govern-
ments and their citizens, and responses to social, cultural, and
technological changes.”36 The editors assert that black writers
expand genre definitions by “appropriating” their “conventions” to
“suit [their] own [authorial] needs, presenting new perspectives
and posing questions not addressed in canonical works.”37 Yet I
ponder, at what point does a specific faction of writers appropriate
and adapt a genre so much so that it changes the very nature of
a thing? Have black women creators breached the boundaries of
speculative fiction so much that it has begun to collapse under the
multiplicitous demands of black women genre writers? I certainly

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 believe so. Within the dexterous machinations of black women
creators, speculative fiction becomes more exclusive; it is raced, it
is gendered, and it begins to steep itself in that which is labeled the
African. Speculative fiction’s flexibility becomes fluid, a fiction that
roils and flows with purpose.

Race and Gender . . . and Genre

Many critics have proposed different frameworks and nomen-
clatures that recognize the racial and gendered gaps found in the
oversimplifications of speculative fiction. Afrofuturism represents a
successful articulation at recognizing the fluidity of science fiction
and, to some extent, fantasy as viewed through the lens of race, for
it is “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and
addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth
century technoculture—and, more generally, African American
signification that appropriates images of technology and a pros-
thetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be
called Afrofuturism.”38 Another critic, Mark Sinker, insists that the
“central fact” of Afrofuturism “is an acknowledgement that [the]
Apocalypse [has] already happened—Armageddon [has] been in
effect.”39 The understanding of the contemporary postapocalyptic
existence of Africa and its diaspora centers on colonialism and the
transatlantic slave trade—that period of physical, cultural, and psy-
chological loss was the Apocalypse. Afrofuturism has proven to be
a shifting theory that centers itself on the relations between the
African diaspora and science fiction/speculative fiction drawing
from the most popular trope of the genre, exploring the very nature
of being alien. Afrofuturism adopts this theme, which in its past
has worked as a poorly disguised metaphor for discussing race—
for example, James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) in which the Na’vi,
the race of blue aliens on the moon, Pandora, are a lazily prob-
lematic conflation of random indigenous cultures, and the actors
voicing the Na’vi are all of African descent. Afrofuturism also acts
as a reaction against the multicultural, “one-race” narrative of the
future that actively erases blackness in a technological utopia.

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 “Afrofuturism” has become a term for all things black and
genre-related (with the exception of horror). Many authors have
been placed under its auspices, most especially Octavia Butler as
well as Amiri Baraka, Nalo Hopkinson, Derrick Bell, and even
Toni Morrison. The theory moves beyond the literary to encom-
pass all manner of texts, from short stories such as Derrick Bell’s
“The Space Traders” (1992), Nisi Shawl’s “At the Huts of Ajala”
(2000), and W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” (1920), to film, exem-
plified by Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus (1959), Ivan Dixon’s
The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1973), and even John Sayles’s The
Brother from Another Planet (1984). One of the most auspicious
aspects of Afrofuturism remains its interaction with music texts;
many of the diaspora’s most interesting musical acts display funda-
mental elements of Afrofuturism, including but not limited to jazz
composer Sun Ra, psychedelic funk originators George Clinton
and the Parliament Funkadelic, as well as contemporary chanteuse
Janelle Monae. These texts exemplify the range and multiplicities
of Afrofuturism’s existence as “a much more varied and complex
set of relationships between domination and subordination, white-
ness and color, ideology and reality, technology and race.”40 The
question then arises, is the articulation of Afrofuturism applicable
to the genre writings of the black women examined in this project?
Where is the critical need for another term, another framework,
and one more neologism? For all of its successes, the Afrofuturistic
paradigm reveals two specific apertures: it possesses a myopic focus
upon the future that fails to encompass a full engagement with its
African past, and this myopia possesses an overpowering influence
of science fiction.
My investigation of Afrofuturism begins by highlighting that
the theory grounds itself in the notion that those of the African
diaspora are a dispossessed community “whose past has been
deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently
been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history.”41 For
Afrofuturism, the African diaspora exists without a history signif-
icant enough for a deep engagement. Admittedly, the framework
has displayed a certain affinity for Egyptian themes in many of its

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 visual texts—but I read this engagement as perfunctory and at best
performing the service of aligning blackness with an already estab-
lished acceptance of the superior intelligence and futurist thinking
of Ancient Egypt.42 Afrofuturism’s insistence upon a logic of ahis-
toricity is simply without merit. But a framework of blackness that
cleaves from its past—occupying a postapocalyptic/postslavery
dialectic—provides room to fixate upon the future.43 Kodwo Eshun
insists that Afrofuturism is “concerned with the possibilities for
intervention within the dimension of the predictive, the projected,
the proleptic, the envisioned, the virtual, the anticipatory and the
future conditional.” Eshun refers to this intervention as a chronop-
olitical act that allows “black artists, musicians, critics, and writers
[who] have made . . . the future, in moments where any future
was made difficult for them to imagine.” 44 In truth, Afrofuturist
frameworks center themselves on multiple disruptions to the falla-
cious linearity of time—but for my critical purposes, their specific
point of intervention, transatlantic slavery, is already too far into
the future. I insist that the authors studied in this text begin their
intervention in precolonial Africa, thereby changing the implica-
tions and understanding of what is truly considered African.
Afrofuturism has consistently made an effort to be gender
inclusive in expressions of its values. Afro-Future Females: Black
Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory (2008)
exists as a successful attempt to examine the intersections of race
and gender within the context of Afrofuturism even as it fails to
fully account for the multiple ways in which specific black women
authors are redenominating the genre. Scholar Marlene S. Barr
begins by chiding Mark Dery and the framework’s initial mascu-
linist preponderance, but she also uses this weakness as an oppor-
tunity for her volume to explore the gendered renderings black
women offer to the field. Barr’s volume demonstrates a significant
contribution to the growing field of black woman–authored genre
content as she offers new original texts as well as innovative anal-
yses of the most contemporary works by dominant critics in the
field. I again find an inability of Afrofuturism—even in this itera-
tion focusing on black woman–authored content and critique—to

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 account for both the genre dexterity and the historical literary
implications of authors such as Nalo Hopkinson, Gayl Jones, and
Nnedi Okorafor. Barr’s framework revision remains within the
limits of science fiction, thereby failing to encompass the genre
movements and conflations present in the authors’ works. Though
there are fleeting mentions of fantasy and, to a lesser extent, hor-
ror, Barr’s primary concern is to expand science fiction. The vol-
ume’s introduction reveals Barr’s stated goal to “indicate the ways
in which science fiction should be reconceptualized” through the
study of Afrofuture females.45 Unfortunately, Barr’s myopic visions
of revitalizing science fiction are incapable of encompassing and
fully explicating the complicated nature of black women’s genre
fiction. My intent is to push Barr’s initial ideas further, for it is my
contention that these creators are simultaneously revising multiple
aspects of genre fiction even as they reconceive notions of black
feminist prose as a whole. Afrofuture females are consistently
referred to as a new phenomenon, again revealing the framework’s
apertures concerning the past. The previous chapter of this text
elucidated how genre-bending authors of this chapter are decid-
edly placed within the lineage of black feminist literary history. In
the end, Afrofuturism’s gender troubles, coupled with its lack of
deep engagement with the past in which “it is easy to lose track
of history,” demonstrate its inability to account for the oscillating
nature of black women writers’ purposeful play with genre, black-
ness, and gender construction.46

Fluid Fiction
Fluid fiction is a racially gendered framework that revises genre
fiction in that it purposefully obfuscates the boundaries of science
fiction/fantasy/horror writing just as black women confound the
boundaries of race, gender, and class. Fluid fiction develops from
complex aesthetic traditions that derive from a literary homeplace
constructed by black women genre writers. Homeplace, bell hooks
articulates, is a place far away from the Western world’s objec-
tification of blackness and creates a safe space in which black

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 men, women, and children become subjective beings of agency.47
I extrapolate from hooks’s theories of homeplace, radical black
subjectivities, and black feminist aesthetic theory to argue for black
women genre writers’ determination in creating a literary home-
place from which fluid fiction flows. I assert that fluid fiction is the
result of black women’s fight for literary subjectivity within genre
fiction and that black women writers act as a destabilizing force for
problematic genre delineations that too often render them invis-
ible and silent. I center my textual analysis of fluid fiction on the
genre-thwarting oeuvre of Nalo Hopkinson, whose work stands
as an exemplar of the tenets of fluid fiction. As the result of the
politically liberatory act of hewing space for gendered black genre
literature, fluid fiction becomes what writer Samuel R. Delaney
terms “a useful and efficient distinction” in which black women
articulate themselves under their own terms.48
Literary homeplace describes a constructed intellectual space
of subjective freedom and resistance created and maintained by
black women genre writers. In this space of self-revelation, black
women creators are freed from the constraints of literary respect-
ability politics in which they must always be concerned with larger
black feminist goals of being deemed writers of literature.49 Here,
authors are encouraged and given the agency to be different, to play
with genre as they incorporate expressions of their raced, gendered,
classed, and sexual identities. bell hooks suggests that participants
in homeplace “are working to make spaces where black women can
dialogue about everything, spaces where we can engage in critical
dissent without violating one another.”50 It is in such a space that
an author such as Nalo Hopkinson can produce a story in which a
heterosexual couple uses the technological wonders of a body suit
that acts as a pleasure aid that allows them to switch sexual organs.
The pleasure found in exchanging nooks and crannies and Cleve
finding “out what it feels like to have a poonani” is celebrated
as a sexy voyeuristic fantasy of the reader to discover the inti-
mate pleasures found in long-term monogamous relationships.51
Within this homeplace, Hopkinson grabs the opportunity to do
the unexpected, to develop Cleve and Issy’s cries of pleasure into

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 pain as the story detours into science fiction horror—the Senstim
Co-operation’s wetsuits take on a life of their own to become dan-
gerous ganger balls of electricity once carelessly discarded by the
couple after coitus. In the midst of the dangerous doppelgänger
of sexual lightning threatening both characters, Hopkinson brings
the reader back to the essence of love as the danger is destroyed
through a combination of improved communication between the
lovers and the strength of touching each other, skin to skin. I again
stress that only within a racially gendered community of safety and
psychosocial inner peace can Hopkinson feel so open to express
her black woman weird—because ultimately the construction
of literary homeplace is about self-recovery and developing the
strength to push back against the static notions that bind black
women’s creative genre fiction. A literary homeplace goes beyond
the figuration of peace, for its most powerful element remains
its existence as a “site of resistance” against multiple hegemonies.
Literary homeplace sustains an antagonistic relationship toward
the hegemonies of the white patriarchal constructions of literature
that mark Canon formation, the white patriarchal constructions
of genre literature that is marginalized by the Canon, as well as
the black feminist literary hegemony that forced its way into the
Canon and perpetuates misguided ideas of what constitutes black
women’s literary expression.
The fluid fiction produced in this homeplace offers black women
creatives the freedom to explore multiples aspects of black feminist
theories within a literary context without being bound by privileg-
ing of the lived realities of black women and literary respectability
politics, early concerns of black feminist literary theory. In “Ganger
Ball Lightning,” Hopkinson demonstrates common issues located
within black sexual politics between heterosexual couples, includ-
ing emotional mistrust, perpetuating damning sexual stereotypes
of each other, and the need to reach a healthy place of maturity,
healing, and support for success.52 For in order to truly reach out
and touch each other’s skin—therefore banishing the electronic
ganger endangering both of their lives—Cleve and Issy must
admit to their emotional insecurities with the same vigor in which

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 they revealed their deepest desires as they wore the pleasure suits.
Cleve and Issy’s love finds root as Cleve sacrifices himself to the
ganger and discloses that he does not believe himself to be special
to Issy: “If I’m not there, there’s always sugar, or food, or booze. I’m
just one of her chosen stimulants.”53 Issy’s surprise at Cleve’s open-
ness spurs her to call the ganger to pay attention to her as she con-
fesses her dislike for the suits because all she ever wants is to feel
him, “Some heat. Some feeling. Like I show you. Like I feel. Like
I feel for you.”54 Hopkinson’s writing reflects Collins’s sociological
concerns in a fascinating way that encompasses the complications
and multiplicities of black womanhood, particularly here within
a couple’s emotional catharsis when Cleve quietly concedes the
real reason he purchased the technological wonders of the pleasure
skins: “The only time we seem to reach each other now is through
our skins. So I bought something to make our skins feel more,
and it’s still not enough.”55 As Issy finally understands why he had
“started looking so sad all the time,” she ignores the danger of the
ganger and reaches out to touch Cleve, her love. It is only then
that the ganger overloads and disappears with a popping sound. As
the couple lay exhausted on the floor in each other’s arms, Cleve
deduces that they canceled the ganger out by touching each other
and touching it, “we neutralized it.”56 Hopkinson demonstrates
that black women’s truths can be explored outside the harsh nature
of reality, that indeed the fluidity of genre proves to reflect black
women’s reality just as effectively. It is necessary to note that even
as Hopkinson subverts some of the more constricting black femi-
nist literary ideals, she is still in conversation with the tradition by
centering black womanhood and their unique experiences. Fluid
fiction demands that black feminist literary theory expand to meet
it on its own terms or leave a growing coterie of black women
authors behind.
Fluid fiction writers are also a destabilizing force to main-
stream genre fiction, for the authors’ insistence on suffusing their
work with a radical black feminist subjectivity openly challenges
the limitations genre has historically placed on racially gendered
inquiries. hooks insists that “assimilation, imitation, or assuming

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 the role of rebellious exotic other are not the only available options
and never have been.”57 Black women genre writers refuse to be
what genre fiction expects of them as they consistently fight invis-
ibility and are becoming a notable presence only under their own
terms. It must be noted that their refusal is not simply an opposi-
tional stance; hooks refers to opposition as “low-hanging fruit” and
far too simplistic a notion to comprehend all that is black wom-
en’s genre fiction. Literary homeplace and its resulting product are
never still, for destabilization never finds roots, the resistance of
fluid fiction is constantly engaging, revising, erasing essentialism
even as it incorporates alternative cosmologies, epistemologies, and
ontologies. For hooks reiterates that “we must employ fluidity to
speak for ourselves.”58 The gall to speak for themselves, to demand
subjectivity in a genre fiction that refuses to adequately see them,
must be understood as a radically political and liberatory act.
Fluid fiction allows black women creatives to seize subjectivity
by consistently shifting the aesthetic framework of genre fiction as a
whole. hooks proposes aesthetic theory as “a way of inhabiting space,
a particular location, a way of looking and becoming,” and it must
be understood that the continuous changing nature of fluid fiction
gives black women’s literary subjectivity its power within genre.59
These black women have worried the lines of genre to a point of
almost infinite possibility as they incorporate their ontological space
as shifting signifiers of identity. The subjectivity gained within fluid
fiction actively subverts static notions of black, gendered, sexualized,
classed, and genre identity, bringing forth previously inconceivable
notions of self-actualization.60 Fluid fiction becomes a necessary
tool for confounding dominant hegemonic structures, for its fluidity
removes opportunities of containment; its flexible shape always
provides the opportunity to go under, around, and even over imped-
iments to its movement. Referencing Audre Lorde in the intro-
duction to her edited volume So Long Been Dreaming:Postcolonial
Science Fiction and Fantasy (2004), “In my hands, massa’s tools don’t
dismantle massa’s house—and in fact, I don’t want to destroy it so
much as I want to undertake massive renovations—then build me
a house of my own.”61 The subjective nature of fluid fiction offers a

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 new “alternative habit of being and resistance” by heavily borrowing
from non-Western, specifically African diasporic traditions.62 For
in order to properly read these authors’ works, we must profoundly
alter previous critical literary paradigms.
The powerful nature of the fluid model develops within the dis-
junctures of the already marginalized nature of genre literature. In
her discussions on black mothering, Patricia Hills Collins describes
disjunctures as those times and spaces in-between in which moth-
erwork gets done. I move the term from the language of mothering
to see disjunctures within a fictive context. Disjunctures, similar to
lacunae, gaps, and interstices, have long been associated as places
of power for black women and reveal the authority black women
possess to “move out of their place.”63 It is in the interstices in
which black women undertake the most dynamic work that best
addresses the potent variations of their subjectivity. It is betwixt
and between the interlocking hegemonical structures determined
to dominate their concerns that the black woman genre author
finds a respite to simply be and create within the literary home-
place. It is necessary to highlight that the concept of homeplace
itself displays remarkable changeability. It is not simply one loca-
tion but many that “accept[] dispersal and fragmentation as part
of ” their construction as a paradigmatic alternative to hegemonic
forces.64 Disjunctures are not only powerful places to build and
maintain subjectivity, they possess effective political and cultural
reverberations. It is the agency displayed in the authors’ decision
to choose the location of cultural production that is so incredibly
subversive and empowering. The interstitial nature of being “part
of the whole but outside the main body” provides black women
genre authors a peculiar position with which to view the scaffold-
ing that contributes to the false and vulnerable constructivity of
hegemonic forces of cultural production. Disjunctures are places
of powerful transformation. Fluid fiction presents a counterpar-
adigm that encompasses the structural and immovable nature of
staid binaries, flowing within and seeping into the exposed weak
points of institutional structures. Nalo Hopkinson proves the
radical possibilities found within fluid fiction.

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 The Fluid Fiction of Nalo Hopkinson
The literature of Nalo Hopkinson expresses the three significant
features of fluid fiction by intentionally slipping between and con-
flating the genre boundaries of science fiction, fantasy, and horror,
as well as centering the narrative on the women and cultures of the
African diaspora; even the authors maintain a conversation with
other fluid fiction writers as well as classic black feminist literature.
Nalo Hopkinson has published across the textual spectrum, and
I focus my analysis on two short stories, “Greedy Choke Puppy”
and “A Habit of Waste” from her collection Skin Folk (2001) and
her novel Sister Mine (2013).
Nalo Hopkinson has long been characterized as the leading
voice in black women’s speculative fiction and has rarely, if ever,
spoken against this labeling of her work. Therefore, I am mindful of
placing her work within an alternative paradigm, but I hope to evi-
dence how fluid fiction is more appropriate as it provides a racially
gendered theoretical foundation in which her works operate.
Hopkinson is a child of the Caribbean; she was born in Jamaica,
raised in Trinidad and Guyana, before spending a few decades in
Toronto—home to the largest expatriate Caribbean communities
in the world. All of her works worry the boundaries of genre fiction
as they delineate and conflate different aspects of science fiction,
fantasy, and horror, usually by troubling Western cultural mores
with the interstitiality of Caribbean society. The stories and values
of the Caribbean—a mixture of British, French, Spanish, and/or
Dutch cultural structures heavily blurred through the morays of
Indigenous and African diasporic identities—provide the lubrica-
tion that allows Hopkinson to flow through the categories of genre
fiction. Previous critics have termed Hopkinson’s literature as dis-
playing characteristics of hybridity and/or transgressive in nature,
but both terms fail to account for the oscillatingly forward motion
of fluidity.65 Hybridity is a complex mixture without motion
while transgression stymies that motion, locking it into a crab-
like movement across boundaries. It is only the concept of fluidity
that encompasses the total possibilities of movement available to

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 black women creators such as Hopkinson—back and forth, to and
fro, side to side, up and down, diagonals and spirals—movement
always within a continuous forward progression.
Her short story “Greedy Choke Puppy” blends elements
of fantasy and horror as it revises the European horror fable of
the witch—an old woman who feeds off of the young to remain
youthful in appearance—and intertwines it with the French leg-
end of the vampire into a retelling of the Caribbean folk tale of the
soucoyant. The soucouyant, or ol’ higue, is the “Caribbean equiva-
lent of the vampire myth . . . [and] derives from the French verb
‘sucer,’ to suck. “Ol’ Hige’ is the Guyanese creole expression for
an old hag, or witch woman.”66 The plot centers on a daughter of
the African diaspora, Jacky, a humanities Ph.D. student increas-
ingly anxious about her place on the other side of thirty without
a steady partner and/or nuclear family. Her supposedly waning
appeal to men haunts her deeply: “I get to find out that when
you pass you prime, and you ain’t catch no man eye, nothing ain’t
left for you but to get old and dry-up like cane leaf in the fire.”67
Jacky obsesses even as she genuinely attracts a smart, handsome,
and affable Terry—whom she subsequently scares off by bring-
ing up marriage barely two weeks into dating. Her grandmother’s
attempts to comfort Jacky’s angst increasingly lack the power to
soothe, as she advises “love will come. But take time.”68 Granny
also endeavors to quell the heat of Jacky’s growing jealousy of her
pregnant and partnered friend, Carmen. Granny warns her that
the women of their family tend to run hot—“hot for life, hot for
youth”—and advises her to seek healing and patience through
other ways of loving: “Love your studies, look out for your friends-
them. Love your old Granny.”69 Yet hot tears slide down Jacky’s
face as she ponders the announcement of the birth of Carmen’s son.
Hopkinson steadily escalates the metaphoric association of fire
and heat to Jacky’s growing panic—that she will fail in fulfill-
ing the sociocultural roles the hegemony demands of women she
has dangerously internalized. Jacky’s rising temperature paral-
lels that of the soucouyant, whose psyche we experience in ital-
icized first-person narration because it is literally a ball of fire:

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 “The soucouyant is usually an old, evil-tempered woman who
removes her skin at night, hides it, and then changes into a ball of
fire. She flies through the air, searching for homes in which there
are babies. She then enters the house . . . and sucks the life from
its [the child’s] body.”70 Clearly, Hopkinson is shrewdly weaving
African and European cosmologies both new and old to contrib-
ute to the fluid nature of her writing. Hopkinson brings to the
fore her radical subjectivity by infusing fantasy’s ability to revise
and perpetuate old myths with horror’s fascination with blurring
the lines of death and life through the legend of the vampire and
the fear of one’s life essence being stolen to sustain that of another,
supernatural being. I would go even further to suggest that “Greedy
Choke Puppy” also functions as a work of soft science fiction hear-
kening back to Arthur Clarke’s insistence that “magic’s just science
that we don’t understand yet.”71 The science in this story is thinly
veiled by folklore. There is a science to the magic that imbues this
particular story, from the method of how the soucouyant enters the
home—through bedroom windows and keyholes—to the strict
guidelines of how to destroy the being—rubbing the inside of her
discarded skin with hot pepper so that she is finally destroyed by
the dawn’s early light.
“Greedy Choke Puppy” continues to define fluid fiction as
it centers its narrative on the epistemologies and ontologies of
African diasporic women, placing it in conversation with estab-
lished, canonical black women’s literature. I suggest that “Greedy
Choke Puppy” is in direct conversation with both Octavia Butler’s
“The Evening and the Morning and the Night” as well as Toni
Morrison’s Sula (1973) particularly in regards to the burdens and
potential of maternal inheritance—those nonmaterial values,
mores, and ways of being black women inherit from their mothers.72
Butler’s story focuses on a female protagonist, Lynn, living with
Duryea-Gode Disease (DGD), a genetic ailment that causes
its carriers to self-destruct by the age of forty.73 The destruction
begins slowly as sufferers begin to drift off into an emotional and
psychological world of their own, eschewing interaction with
other people. Ultimately the disease ends in a sudden infliction of

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 violence upon themselves, and sometimes others, as the afflicted
person begins to dig: “He began tearing at himself, through skin
and bone, digging. He had managed to reach his own heart before
he died.”74 Survivors are usually hideously scarred, “Her face was
a ruin. Not only her eyes but most of her nose and one ear were
gone. What was left was badly scarred.”75 The plot turns on the
protagonist and her fiancé’s discovery of his mother at the Dilg
estate for those living survivors of DGD. Dilg is a property run
by and for those with DGD, and the protagonist discovers her
destiny to aid her people as she has inherited a specific phero-
mone that enables her to control DGD’s destructive tendencies
through voice guidance and heavy suggestion. “It’s a pheromone.
A scent. And it’s sex-linked.”76 What is most interesting about
the protagonist’s inheritance of both genetic disease and powerful
hormone is that both are given power by her mother. The protag-
onist is a double DGD, as both parents possessed DGD, but the
power of the hormone she emits comes from her mother’s genes:
“women . . . inherit from their mothers but not their fathers. . . .
When two irresponsible DGDs get together and produce girl
children . . . you get someone who can really do some good in a
place like this.”77 That, coupled with the fact that she is a female,
gives her the opportunity to open her own Dilg estate in another
area of the country, furthering the mission of DGD carriers to
help themselves develop healthier coping mechanisms for living
with the disease.
I contend that Hopkinson incorporates the maternal inheri-
tance of heat and the dangerous possibility of becoming a sou-
couyant in “Greedy Choke Puppy” as a moment of engagement for
a literary conversation with DGD found in Butler’s “The Evening
and the Morning and the Night.”78 As a carrier of the hot blood
that runs through the women of her family, Jacky has the potential
to love fiercely and be a powerful force within the lives of those
who currently love her as well as her potential husband. Likewise,
experiencing the genetic malady of DGD offers Lynn great pos-
sibility as a force of social and intellectual change. Lynn studies
biology, as there is “something about our disease [that] makes us

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 good at sciences,” and later, Beatrice distinctly recommends that
she study medicine: “You may be able to do a great deal of good.”79
Whereas Lynn is successfully able to develop her malady—partic-
ularly the fact that she is considered a double DGD—into a useful
tool to sooth and lead those with DGD around her, as Beatrice
notes: “You put them at ease. You’re there. You . . . well, you leave
your scent around the house. You speak to them individually.
Without knowing why, they no doubt find that very comforting.”80
Still, Jacky is unable to come to such a peace, perhaps because she
is able to fully accept the loving embrace of her community or
even perhaps because she is partnered with Alan, who offers her a
steady presence on which to lean.
I further suggest that Jacky’s lack of partner and her subse-
quent emotional and physical destruction parallel that of the tit-
ular character, Sula, of Morrison’s 1973 novel. Both Sula and Jacky
are iconoclasts, struggling with the black community’s sociosexual
expectations of respectable black womanhood. Sula’s story is well
known; she is “an artist without form,” a woman who enjoys sleep-
ing with men—even white men—on her own terms and relishes
her status as a single woman who belongs only to herself. Yet she
is outcast because her singularity is read as dangerous by the black
community because of her refusal to live within their strictures of
decorum. The Bottom attempts to punish Sula through social and
physical excommunication for her disregard of community mores.
It is only the critical loss of her best friend and confidante, Nell, that
leaves Sula truly bereft—to die alone and apart from the one person
she deeply loves and understands. It is necessary to note that, for
Sula, death itself is not a punishment—only a transition. And on the
final page of the novel, Nell recognizes that she has been punish-
ing herself by excluding Sula from her life in her final exclamation
of “Oh Lord, Sula, . . . girlgirlgirl.”81 Hopkinson juxtaposes Jacky’s
destruction as punishment against Sula to continue the story’s
overall parable that black women must find a way to operate outside
of limited social strictures for their happiness and prosperity.
Jacky’s downfall comes specifically because of the actions sur-
rounding a deeply held belief that her worthiness remains based

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 upon her abilities to become a wife and mother. Even as a con-
temporary woman of education and some means—she is a grad-
uate student focusing her research on Caribbean myths—Jacky
is unable to fully distinguish herself from the problematic nature
of community expectations for women. Jacky maintains a vested
interest in defining herself by her lack of success at domesticity.
Further, she buys into the notion that she must remain youthful in
order to hold any viable appeal to men—a societal lie uncovered in
her ability to attract and hold Terry’s romantic interest. Hopkinson
is careful in her construction of Jacky—we view her situation sym-
pathetically because of her Granny’s consistent love and attempts
to help her talk through her fixation on what she lacks. Hopkinson
wants the reader to see this as not a question of Jacky and her lack
of willpower, but as a testament to the power of narrow societal
roles to engross even the most intelligent and modern of women.
Death is Jacky’s punishment as she chooses an amoral method of
maintaining her youthful appearance and attractiveness—stealing
the life essence from babies as a soucouyant. Hopkinson highlights
that Jacky is not punished for her inability to let go of wayward
notions of womanhood, for in giving her an everywoman appeal it
is clear that any one of us can be Jacky and probably are struggling
with redefining successful womanhood.82 The reader commiserates
with Granny as she laments the need to destroy her granddaughter
for killing Carmen’s newborn. For even as she awaits the destruc-
tion the morning sun will visit upon Jacky, Granny continuously
articulates her love for her granddaughter—referring to her as
“doux-doux” and declaring that “you is my life.”83 Jacky’s life acts as
payment for the life she took in her attempt to sustain a way of life
she believed would never come to be.
Hopkinson’s newest novel, Sister Mine, continues her talent for
articulating the tenants of fluid fiction as it contains a narrative that
oscillates between the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror
even as it is centered on a daughter of the African diaspora. Sister
Mine also manifests the final attribute of fluid fiction as its plot
development consistently references classic black feminist texts
such as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) and Toni Morrison’s

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 Beloved (1987). Protagonist Makeda and her formerly conjoined
twin, Abby, are not only women of the African diaspora—they are
direct descendants of the pantheon of West African gods/orishas
as the daughters of the orisha of agriculture. The narrative is a bil-
dungsroman that centers on Makeda’s journey to truth and matu-
rity as she seeks and solidifies her place within the complicated
mysteries of her mystical family. Hopkinson’s work incorporates
science fiction through the rigid rules of magic that govern her
family, and fantasy through Hopkinson’s Africanist re-reading of
the great journey, even as she incorporates horror by reimagining
the African American folklore legend of the haint.
Earlier, I suggested that Hopkinson’s short story “Greedy
Choke Puppy” functions as a work of soft science fiction that
hearkens back to Clarke’s earlier insistence about magic and sci-
ence. If her short story was simply a rough formation of this idea,
Hopkinson’s novel Sister Mine solidifies her refining of fluidly rede-
fining magic as science fiction. Hopkinson’s redefinition is an out-
right act of defiance; eschewing the subversive, she directly strips
science—and the fiction associated with it—of its Westernity, its
association with white, male, and capitalist power. Hopkinson
removes science from its questionable privilege and esteem in the
hegemony. Sister Mine insists on flowing forward by hearkening
back to the ancient ways of power manifestation denounced and
derided by the modernity of science. The novel’s most potent use
of ancient magic is the reimagining of the West African pantheon
of gods.84 Through the characters that populate Makeda’s family,
Hopkinson demands that science fiction recognize and exalt its
African and Indigenous dimensions. The world Hopkinson creates
is segmented and organized in a way that still allows for oscil-
lations of identity. There is the world of the gods and demigods
that compose Makeda’s family and operate on a different spiritual
plane. Makeda and her twin sister, Abby, are the result of an affair
between their demigod father, Daddy Wood, and a human woman.
Daddy Wood’s egregious sin is in the act of actually breeding with
what was considered the help, and he is consequently punished by
his mother, Grandma Ocean, to live a mortal life on the earthly

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 plane. His godliness—or in Hopkinson’s language, his godsoul—is
removed and buried in the roots of a great silk-cotton tree guarded
by human stewards of the family. There is the also the world of
the claypickens or humans who live on the earthly plane and are
oblivious to the magic that suffuses their world. Complicating
this binary are those humans who know of the spiritual world and
operate as intermediaries between the two worlds. Often they are
servants of the Family for generations whether it be guardians of
the silk-cotton tree that contains Makeda’s father’s godsoul or as
permanently chosen mounts for the pantheon. The character Suzy,
mother of two and descendent of a long line of celestial stew-
ards, has been placed in charge of guarding and tending to the
tree, Yggdrasil: “Centuries her family had been in charge of the
hoodoo tree. It was their old guys’ branch of the eternal tree,
the spine of the world’s soul.”85 The dutiful and dangerous duties
of being stewards to the celestials is explored in the second chapter
as Suzy’s family is placed under siege by Daddy Wood’s godsoul,
which has escaped from the great tree and manifested as a pow-
erfully parasitic kudzu plant aggressively attempting to enter her
home. It is here that we see another aspect of the stewards’ service
to the Family, Suzy’s six-year-old daughter, Naima, has been cho-
sen as “Mister Cross’s ridden in this generation of their family”
and is referred to as a “living telephone” responsible for the direct
communications from the Family.86 Naima is characterized as the
ridden because builds off of the Vodou concept of the horse, an
acolyte who is often mounted and ridden, like a horse, by the loa/
god and is seen as its temporary incarnation: “the ‘horse’ commu-
nicates with the congregation through words and stylized dances,
offering advice, becoming a conduit for healing and relishing the
opportunity to be among its devotees.”87 The false binary between
humans and gods becomes more complex with the addition of
Makeda and her no longer conjoined twin, Abby, who are deemed
semicelestial as they are mortals but gifted with special powers
because their of their father’s god-status. Matters are further com-
plicated by a short series of sentences Hopkinson places in the first
chapter: “They’re [the Family] not really venal, that lot, just too big

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 for their britches. They’ve been emissaries of the Big Boss for so
long that they forget that they aren’t gods themselves, just glorified
overseers. But overseers with serious power.”88 Though Hopkinson
never returns to this idea again, she makes it clear that even the
gods aren’t truly gods—or more specifically, not THE God—and
are simply another set of servants gifted with unimaginable powers
and set with the task to shepherd the humans.
It is this information that arms me with the evidence to
ground Hopkinson’s pantheon in the New World manifestations
of traditional African religions—most specifically, Santeria and
Vodou. Both religious frameworks are based upon the idea that
the orishas/loas are emissaries and servants of the greater power of
God—referred to as Oludumare, “also named Olorun and Olofi in
Cuba,” in traditional Santeria is the “earth’s creator and is a remote
being [who] is considered an inaccessible and omnipotent god
who abdicates his powers to divine intermediaries.”89
In Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou
and Santeria to Obeah and Espiritismo (2003) authors Margarite
Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert insist that
Vodou is, at its essence, a monotheistic religion: “practitioners rec-
ognize a single and supreme spiritual entity or God—Mawu-Lisa
among the Fon, Olorun among the Yoruba, and Bondié, Bondyé,
or Gran Met (the Good God) in Haiti.”90 The most popular and
familiar aspect of Vodou is its believer’s service to “a pantheon of
powerful spirits called the lwa. The lwa, also know as mystères,
anges, saints, or les invisibles, provide the link between humans
and the divine.”91 Hence a direct link is established between the
syncretic religions of Santeria and Vodou and the Family of demi-
gods or gods (with a small “g”) that comprise Makeda’s magical
relatives. It is necessary to note that though Hopkinson’s gods
are rooted in the African, they proudly exhibit Indigenous and
European influences that heavily shaped identity in the Americas
and the Caribbean. For example, the great tree, Yggdrasil, is of
Norse origin. Yggdrasil is the great mythological ash tree of life
that supports the nine worlds of Norse mythology and its heav-
ens.92 Hopkinson insists her worlds push beyond the simplicities

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 of black and white, for “there are African, European, Asian, and
South Asian people there [in the Caribbean world in which she
came of age], all with centuries-long histories of being in the
Caribbean—not to mention the aboriginal cultures. . . . And all
of those races and cultures have undergone and are undergoing a
certain amount of mixing.”93 Religious and cultural syncretism—
or the successful weaving together of at least two opposing reli-
gions and/or philosophies—is an incredibly important theme in
the work, for Hopkinson privileges acknowledging and reveling in
the multiplicities of her characters and the worlds in which they
operate.
The novel’s privileging of traditional African religions weaves
throughout the characterizations of Makeda’s family. The matri-
arch, Grandma Ocean—described as the original deity that bore
the subsequent gods and goddesses that compose Makeda’s father,
aunts, uncles, and cousins—rules the family. Grandma Ocean’s
characterization is directly linked to the orisha Yemayá: “Grandma’s
province is the waters of the world, salt and sweet both.”94 Yemayá
is not only the orisha of the ocean, she is the goddess of all bod-
ies of water, and blue is the color associated with her presence.
Yemayá represents the multiplicities of motherhood as she is often
described as life-giving, nurturing, and loving, but she also mani-
fests as a “fierce warrior that kills anyone who threatens her chil-
dren.”95 Still, Hopkinson again displays her enjoyment of flowing
through boundaries by adding one, almost fleeting description of
the actions of Grandma Ocean’s horse—she “flip[s] open a fancy
yellow lace fan to cool her face with.”96 This minor observation
reflects Hopkinson’s unwillingness to heed all boundaries, even
those rooted in the African. The fancy yellow fan is a celebrated
characteristic, not of Yemayá, but of her sister, Oshun, the orisha
of romantic love, seduction, and fertility who occupies the rivers of
the world and reigns over the colors yellow and gold. Oshun often
manifests as a young coquette who uses a yellow fan to flirt with
and dance for those blessed with her presence. Though Sister Mine
contributes to Hopkinson’s lifelong authorial project of revealing
the large influence traditional African religions have on Caribbean

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 culture, this small observation reveals that even then she revels in
the fluidity of identity characteristic of fluid fiction.
Makeda’s family members reflect multiple orishas present in
the West African pantheon. Her father, Daddy Wood, is a god
of agriculture: “His talents are growing, grafting, and pruning.”97
Beyond his mastery as a gardener, Daddy Wood also attracts
woodland animals, as the family’s home was always filled with
creatures large and small: “Living organisms liked to be near
Daddy. . . . [The nursing home was] experiencing . . . squirrels
clambering down the chimney, alarmed deer in the foyer . . . an
intrusion of cockroaches.”98 Daddy Wood draws some of his char-
acterization from the Vodou lwa Azaka—usually referred to as
Kouzin Zaka—who “walks the earth as a farmer, beggar, and vag-
abond . . . who works with his hands and loves a simply, happy
life.”99 Hopkinson develops the majority of Daddy Wood’s char-
acterization from Orisha Oko—“the master of agriculture, farm-
ing, fertility, and the mysteries associated with the earth, life and
death.”100 The influence of Oko is seen in the character’s spiritual
and ontological conflation of life and death—Daddy Wood spends
the majority of the novel in a coma with his godsoul embodied and
on the run in an ever-expanding kudzu vine threatening to infect
the earth’s biodiversity with the parasitic plant named Quashee.
Daddy Wood’s escaped godsoul disturbs the Earth’s balance and
initiates Hopkinson’s complicated plot machinations. Similarly,
Daddy Wood’s brother, interchangeably referred to as Uncle Jack,
Leggy John, and Mister Cross embodies the lwa Papa Legba, also
known as the orisha Eleggua. Makeda explains that her uncle Jack
“is a ferryman between the worlds”; it is his responsibility to bring
the dead to the other world and new life—babies—to this one.101
Eleggua is the most important orisha because of this crucial role
he plays as the guide between the two worlds. He remains the
first orisha created by Oludumare and is the key to any commu-
nication between this earthly plane and the celestial one where
the orishas reside: “Eleggua is the owner of all roads, crossroads,
and doors. . . . He facilitates divination by communicating to and
for the other orishas, and to Oludumare herself.”102 Papa Legba

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 occupies a nearly identical role within the Vodou pantheon and,
similarly, often incarnates as an old man with a cane. Hopkinson
also incorporates aspects of Baron Samedi, a leading ghede—or
spirit—of the dead known for his sharp, funereal dress: “[Uncle
John] swirled his cape out of the way, dropped his gold-topped
cane, and opened the long reach to welcome us. In her haste, Abby
knocked his top hat off.”103 Here in Uncle John’s characterization
Hopkinson skillfully blends aspects of the popularized Baron
Samedi—his top hat and cape—with the cane associated with
the lesser-known but more powerful orisha/lwa most associated
with death and/or transition, Eleggua/Papa Legba.104 Hopkinson
continues to play with the fluctuating identities of orishas with
her characterization of Makeda’s other uncle, General Gun, and
his other manifestation—or camino—Uncle Hunter. Caminos, or
roads, are the different avatars of an orisha here on the earthly
plane: “each road has a slightly different temperament and is found
in a different place in nature.”105 General Gun literally transitions
into different caminos as Makeda speaks to him—for his charac-
terization is grounded in Orisha Ogún. Ogún is a warrior god who
fights against injustice against his peoples: “Ogún has the intelli-
gence and creativity to invent tools, weapons, and technology. He
is the father of civilization in many ways. . . . It was his tools and
labor that cleared away the wilderness to build cities, homes and
roads.” When Makeda first approaches her uncle, his eyes are lik-
ened to cold iron even as “the General was wearing fatigues, a hel-
met, heavy laced boots. He was carrying a Kalashnikov.”106 Here,
General Gun manifests Ogún Shibirikí, an “assassin who . . . is
driven by bloodlust,” as he curtly dismisses their questions as he
turns his back to his twin nieces.107 While turning his back, General
Gun becomes Ogún Alagbede, the “blacksmith who crafts tools
and weapons tirelessly at his forge.”108 Makeda describes the shift
as almost instantaneous: “he turned his back on us and returned
to forging red-hot steel on an anvil . . . his chest had gone bare.
The sweat beading his dark skin flickered red, reflecting the
incandescent metal he was working. Each upper arm was thicker
around than both my thighs together. He pounded his hammer on

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 Fig. 7. Ogun Rising by Black Kirby.

the anvil in time with the beating of the palais drums. . . . I was
pretty sure he wasn’t making a ploughshare.”109
General Gun continues to shift, first into an army information
officer and then into a businessman in a suit. Our protagonist is
more than aware of the multitudes that construct her uncle because
she begins to refers to him/them as “the lot.”110 Suddenly, General
Gun becomes Uncle Hunter as Hopkinson brings in another man-
ifestation of the orishas, Ogun’s close compatriot Ochosi.111 Ochosi
“is a skilled, stealthy hunter . . . who always hit[s] the mark with

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 his arrow. [He] knows the wilderness better than anyone else and
has mastered the art of tracking his prey and killing it while being
totally undetectable.”112 Yet even as Makeda describes the figure
as Uncle Hunter, he manifests a camino of Ogun. Uncle Hunter
wears a “snappy suit” and carries a briefcase and a cell phone
“clipped to his waist in a tasteful leather hard-shell case.”113 Uncle
Hunter is also Ogún Onilé, the manifestation that “establishes him-
self as the king of new lands and is a benevolent chief.”114 Clearly,
Hopkinson plays upon the concept of benevolence, for it is evident
that Uncle Hunter’s concept of benevolence literally depends upon
whether one is a hunter or the prey. Reveling in the fact that he
is truly in charge and is no longer beholden to the limits placed
upon his killing prowess by Daddy Wood, Uncle Hunter basks in
his mother’s approval: “I’ve been doing his job just fine, haven’t I,
Ma?”115 General Gun/Uncle Hunter becomes a metonym for the
undulating genre motions of Hopkinson’s narratives—though a
minor character, his continual metamorphoses embody the fluidity
of Hopkinson’s textual methodology that the text is in motion.116
Sister Mine smoothly changes caminos—or ways—from one genre
demonstration to the other, conflating, separating, and subverting
science fiction, fantasy, and horror as it unveils the potentialities
Hopkinson’s writing offers both black feminist and genre fiction.
Hopkinson continues to display fluid fiction in her redefining
of fantasy within a black feminist framework even as her writ-
ing in Sister Mine takes advantage of the nebulous boundaries the
genre shares with science fiction and horror. Nnedi Okorafor, a
literary inheritor of Hopkinson, is also known for her racialized
theory of the fantasy genre organic fantasy. Though not specifically
gendered, organic fantasy does offer insight into how Hopkinson
begins to revise the fantasy genre in a way that benefits and feeds
into the subversive nature of fluid fiction. Okorafor describes
organic fantasy as similar to general fantasy, for “it has the power
to make something familiar strange.”117 Okorafor then qualifies
organic fantasy as a genre that “blooms directly from the soil of
the real. . . . It is the most truthful way of telling the truth. For me,
fantasy is the most accurate way of describing reality.”118 Organic

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 fantasy, and its purposeful play between the real and the not real,
articulates how Hopkinson redefines fantasy for her own use—
ultimately revising genre fiction itself into a fluid fiction literary
framework. Hopkinson states her love for the potential inherent
in fantasy: “I like the way that fantastical fiction allows me to use
myth, archetype, speculation and storytelling. I like the way that
it allows me to imagine the impossible. . . . I don’t see science fic-
tion and fantasy as just wishful thinking. . . . If black people can
imagine our futures, imagine—among other things—cultures in
which we aren’t alienated, then we can begin to see our way clear
to creating them.”119 As discussed earlier, Hopkinson grounds her
fantasy in the shape-shifting reality of the Caribbean. Sister Mine
is suffused with the traditional African religions that manifest in
the Caribbean. The language of the characters is infused with the
patois of the Anglophone Caribbean—words such as “claypick-
ens,” “horse,” “doux-doux,” and “haint.” Hopkinson moves organic
fantasy from Okorafor’s Nigeria to the New World, the Caribbean,
and its diaspora in Toronto.
Hopkinson similarly revises the genre of horror as she conflates
it with science fiction and fantasy into fluid fiction. Sister Mine’s
revision of mainstream horror is most evident in its presentation
and treatment of Makeda’s haint. Haint is a popular aphorism for a
ghost, particularly an evil spirit in African American—specifically
southern—folklore and colloquialism. It is a linguistic revision of
the word “haunt,” or ghost. Hopkinson’s use of the term “haint”
is particularly noteworthy. In previous texts—such as Brown Girl
in the Ring (1998), Skin Folk (2001), and The Salt Roads (2003)—
Hopkinson refers to ghosts with the decidedly Caribbean term
“duppy.” I suggest that this development is purposeful as it demon-
strates one more culture feeding into the shifting influences of this
text’s primary cosmologies. The use of the word “haint” acknowl-
edges the significance of African American influence, just as
Yggdrasil nods to her world’s European influence.
Makeda’s haint revises the horror trope of the ghost by making
it a corporeal being that is able to attack her at almost anytime and
anywhere. Hopkinson’s choice is so pronounced because ghosts are

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 usually tied to a particular area and often hindered in their purpose
due to their lack of mobility. Makeda’s haint is unhindered by such
qualms; it attacks her any time she is vulnerable and alone, such
as at the wooded lakefront where we are first introduced to the
being that has the ability to cause physical harm: “I felt the scrape
of claws slicing through the fabric of my jeans as I pulled away.
My haint was upon me. Its small, heavy body scrambled, quar-
relling, up my side. Hideously contorted baby face, brown as my
own, its hair an angry, knotted snarl of black. No it had those large
hands at my throat.”120 The baby monster Makeda describes is not
a poltergeist, nor is it simply a psychological disturbance associated
with the unease of a particular place; this haint is an imminent
physical threat. Typical of ghostly horror, the haint is a fearsome
thing—Makeda speaks of her terror, she screams at its appear-
ance and bleeds with its vicious attacks—placing it squarely within
the horror genre. Makeda’s encounters with the haint become
increasingly heinous battles for her very life: “I tore it off me and
swung it around, full weight, to crack it with a dull thud against the
bole of a tree.”121 Hopkinson allows the reader to be comfortable
with reading the haint as a ghost on steroids, and then she upends
her own dynamic. In actuality, Makeda’s haint is her own mojo/
godsoul that was removed from her body as a child by her uncle
Leggy Jack on the order of Grandma Ocean. Her haint hasn’t
actually been haunting her to inspire terror, but to reincorporate
itself into its rightful host—Makeda. In the end, Makeda’s dis-
covery of the true nature of her haint integrates this classic horror
trope with the science fiction of the West African pantheon and
the unreal realities of the organic fantasy, ultimately demonstrat-
ing a major tenet of fluid fiction—the conflation and oscillation
between science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
I end my analysis of Sister Mine through the fluid fiction
framework by demonstrating how the text is in dialogue with
classic black feminist literature. Sister Mine possesses the intensely
fraught and complicated relationship between sisters, leading me
to conclude that Hopkinson is in direct conversation with the short
essay “From the Poets in the Kitchen” (1983) by Paule Marshall.

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 I have discussed Hopkinson’s unique talent for incorporating
Caribbean language use and rhythms throughout this section’s
analysis of her selected works—how she incorporates Creole words
such as “doux-doux” and “claypicken.” Hopkinson’s talent and inter-
est as a wordsmith places Sister Mine in the midst of a linguistic
conversation popularized by the kitchen table poets that dominate
Marshall’s short, critical essay. Both daughters of the Caribbean,
Hopkinson and Marshall concern themselves with the power that
creole languages imbue in women who have emigrated. Marshall
describes her mother and her girlfriends as poets sitting at the fam-
ily’s kitchen table whose breadth of discussion and linguistic acro-
batics “functioned as an outlet for the tremendous creative energy
they possessed. . . . The[ir] need for self-expression was strong, and
since language was the only vehicle readily available to them they
made of it an art form—in keeping with the African tradition in
which art and life are one—was an integral part of their lives.”122
Hopkinson takes the mimetic ideas explored in Marshall’s essay
and brings them to her fantastical worlds built around the lives
and journeys of daughters of the diaspora—Makeda and Abby—
whose characterization as artists, quilter and singer, respectively,
reflect the Africanized language expression found in Marshall’s
piece. Hopkinson steadfastly believes in expressing the importance
of the Caribbean identity of her characters and insists that “a lot
of Caribbean identity is bound up in language. We have used it as
a tool of resistance and politicization.”123 The women of Marshall’s
piece agree, proclaiming: “In this man world you got to take yuh
mouth and make a gun!”124 Marshall highlights the intricacy of the
daily linguistic feats performed by her mother and friends—and
it truly was a performance, for style was just as important as con-
tent: “They had take[n] the standard English taught to them in
the primary schools of Barbados and transformed it into an idiom,
an instrument . . . changing around the syntax and imposing their
own rhythm and accent so that the sentences were more pleasing
to their ears. They added the few African sounds and words that
had survived, such as the derisive suck-teeth sound. . . . And to
make it more vivid, more in keeping with their expressive quality,

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 they brought to bear a raft of metaphors, parables, Biblical quo-
tations, sayings and the like.”125 Hopkinson’s respect for and use
of Creoles allows her to fully represent the complexities of her
characters and their Caribbean identity, for she states: “Creoles
carry their own nuances and textures of meaning. . . . Every nook
of every region of the English-speaking world tailors English to
suit itself. That’s one of the strengths of the language—its flexibil-
ity.”126 It is this flexibility that brings reality to the fluid fiction of
Hopkinson’s fantastical oeuvre. In the following chapter, I expand
the flexibilities explored by Hopkinson’s rendition of fluid fiction
to provide a deeper understanding of black women horror writers.
These women build upon the potentialities and liberatory actions
of fluid fiction to redefine the very nature of horror, placing it in
an Africanized folkloric context ripe with subversive abilities to
challenge mainstream horror writing as well as black feminist lit-
erary theory.

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 
Folkloric Horror
A New Way of Reading Black
Women’s Creative Horror

Critiques originating in black feminist thought, then, have had

a sure effect on the restructuring of traditional disciplines.
—Barbara Christian

A lot of my work begins in horror.

—Nnedi Okorafor

The dead are not dead.

—Dr. Bonnie Barthold

At the climax of Bree Newsome’s short film Wake (2010), the black
woman protagonist, Charmaine, rushes through the woods in her
nightgown, hair unbound with harried, furtive glances behind her
in the morning light. Charmaine’s world has crumbled around
her—her father is dead, and she suspects her recent husband to be a
special kind of evil and possibly inhuman—so she runs to what she
believes is the source of her problems, the death spirit in the woods.
Charmaine’s current temperament is markedly different from the
cool confidence she possessed when she first met the otherworldly

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 death dealer. Days earlier, Charmaine strolled determinedly
single-minded in her purpose to conjure a man. Charmaine was
calm, collected, and prepared. She carried a conjure box, filled with
the likeness of the man of her dreams—deep mahogany skin, a
handsome figure in a sharp white suit, and piercing green eyes—as
well as trinkets of affection and a few bones signifying the sacrifice
of small animals for the exchange of ashe, or life spirit, a necessary
element to bring forth life in root work.1 So far, the narrative had
only hinted at the largest sacrifice Charmaine has given to become
a wife and mother, “A man? Well, you gotta give one to get one!”
the ghede embodied in a honey-colored woman dressed in a volu-
minous red and black dress from a previous century.2 Charmaine
eagerly proffers a handkerchief full of dirt from her father’s fresh
grave. “How’d your Daddy die?” the woman-spirit slyly inquires.
Wake demonstrates the rich potential for the horror genre to
successfully examine the social anxieties that often plague con-
temporary middle-class black women. The twin forces of respect-
ability politics and a supposed dearth of ideal black men have
contributed to working single black professional women into a
frenzy of spinsterhood or worse, single motherhood with little to
no hope of love and wedlock—the only avenue to happiness if
black middle-class values can be believed. Such fears occasionally

Fig. 8. Buena Batiste Webber as The Demon, Wake (2010).

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 spike into the cultural consciousness, with its last peak seen in the
early 2010s characterized by such titles as Ralph Richard Banks’s
Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage
Decline Affects Everyone (2011). Charmaine has been pushed to
act because she fears the social consequences of becoming an old
maid as articulated by the trio of older women gossiping about her
life at her father’s burial: “Charmaine passed the old maid mark a
while ago if you ask me. She’s just lucky her Daddy died when he
did . . . while there’s still time to get married over his dead body.”
Charmaine has, unfortunately, bought into the problematic belief
that black women are incomplete without a socially approved mar-
ital partner. Charmaine sees conjure as her only option, “if ’n you
want something bad enough that praying takes too long,” because
she longs to be whole, a wholeness that can only be fulfilled by a
husband. As the trio of gossips proclaim: “All she needs is a good,
solid man!” Charmaine fails to recognize that she was never bereft
because her community will not allow it. Newsome deftly offers a
racially gendered revision of the horror genre by focusing on the
rich folklore of the African diaspora, specifically the practice of
conjure. And it is conjure and similar tools of West African mysti-
cal agency that provide a central foundation for black women cre-
ators’ transformation of the horror genre explored in this chapter.
Throughout this project, I have explored the presence of the
black woman in horror—whom I earlier named Sycorax—and
how her presence complicates mainstream horror theory, black
feminist theory, and genre writing as a whole. The previous chap-
ter used my critical framework—fluid fiction—to demonstrate
how black women writers redefine genre literature by purposely
conflating and separating genres by redefining them within an
Africanized feminist context. This chapter builds upon the con-
cept of fluid fiction—accepting that black women’s creative works
flow between the definitions of genre—but the women I analyze
in this chapter use the flowing nature of their pieces to specifi-
cally revise and redefine the genre of horror. I insist that Sycorax
is done haunting horror; by refusing to remain a specter, Sycorax
chooses to incarnate—on her own black feminist terms—through

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 the writing, music performance, and visual art of the black women
creators explored throughout this chapter.
The women I discuss in this chapter share a theoretical textual
purpose and vision that are grounded in the principles of natal
African religions. There is precedent for the incredible influence of
African cosmologies and epistemologies in black women’s fiction
as “storytelling becomes a significant means of revising traditional
historiography,” for these women are privileging the subversive
art of storytelling and imbuing it with the authority too often
afforded only to the historical record.3 Scholar Venetria K. Patton
insists that black women writers “tap into the power” of the ances-
tral wisdom of their African ancestors.4 This wisdom informs black
women writers’ most foundational idea, the knowledge that the
spiritual and physical worlds are incredibly intertwined and that
there exists much crossover between the two cosmologies.
Black women creatives possess a unique ability to interweave
African-influenced folklore with the Westernized genres of horror,
fantasy, and science fiction, which coalesce into what I term folk-
loric horror. This chapter explores the concept of folkloric horror
in four distinct sections. In the first section, I define folkloric hor-
ror and discuss how it operates as an articulation of an aesthetic
theory of black women horror creators. The second section expli-
cates how folkloric horror has a literary history in black women’s
writing as I explicate Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) and Erna
Brodber’s Louisiana (1994) within the theoretical framework. I con-
tinue with a demonstration of the potential for folkloric horror to
explicate contemporary black women’s genre writing. I read Kiini
Ibura Salaam’s short story “Rosamojo” (2003) and Chesya Burke’s
“Chocolate Park” (2004) through the folkloric horror framework.
The third section expands folkloric horror in its sonic and perfor-
mative iteration as I read it through the music of Memphis Minnie
and Nina Simone, whom I insist simultaneously embody the role of
blueswoman and conjure women in intentionally subversive ways.
Black women are nearly invisible in the horror industry in all
of its manifestations—publishing, conventions, and community—
with only a few notable exceptions. Tananarive Due has become a

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 staple in the horror industry—her works are popular and well-re-
garded, and she has been nominated for several Bram Stoker Awards
and has been awarded the National Book Award for The Living
Blood (2001) and an NAACP Image Award.5 Linda Addison—a
horror poet—has won numerous Bram Stoker Awards and has
also become a respected editor and cheerleader for women of color
writers in the horror community.6 Yet too many black women hor-
ror writers remain unacknowledged and underappreciated in the
genre’s publishing and surrounding industries. A rising cohort of
black women horror creators refuse to be invisible—following the
advice of bell hooks, these women are teaching us how to see them
and their work.7
The increasing visibility of black women horror writers began
with an entry titled “20 Black Women in Horror Writing” on hor-
ror writer Sumiko Saulson’s professional blog.8 Saulson attempted
to be exhaustive, including writers as varied as Octavia Butler, LA
Banks, Pearl Cleage, N. K. Jemisin, and Nalo Hopkinson. The
response to this list was overwhelming, mostly positive, but also
informing Saulson of so many other black women horror writ-
ers she missed—leading to the subsequent entries, “21 More Black
Women in Horror Fiction” and its follow-up, “19 More Black
Women in Horror Fiction.”9 Ultimately, Saulson published an
eBook titled 60 Black Women in Horror Fiction (2014) that lists the
writers along with their works and interviews, where available.10
The sole purpose of the website and social media presence of
the collective—Graveyard Shift Sisters—is to fight against the
invisibility of black women in horror. The first line of their Mission
Statement demonstrates that the collective “aims to highlight and
celebrate the experiences and achievements of Black women . . .
in the horror (and science fiction) genre.”11 The website features a
trove of blog posts analyzing black women’s place in contemporary
horror, horror movie reviews, and in-depth interviews with black
women horror creators, with a significant emphasis on film studies.
The very name of the collective acknowledges black women’s poor
representation: “It dawned on us that the graveyard shift itself is
that undesirable time to work and be. In a society of 9 to 5 visibility

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 and for some, normalcy, the graveyard shift is held by those willing
to take the slot no one really wants, and for some, taking it with
limited choices. It’s a space where the invisible dwell, the margin-
alized.” Spaces like Graveyard Shift Sisters ultimately reject the
notion of invisibility and recognize the disjunctures in which black
women are so often doing the necessary work to define themselves.
The eschewing of the false idea of invisibility remains the focus of
this chapter, for I maintain that black women have always been
creating horror texts—not unlike Sycorax’s essence that suffuses
Prospero’s island—it is the task of this chapter to privilege the mul-
tiplicities that black women writers demand of horror in creating
their own creative horror aesthetic—folkloric horror.

Toward a Black Women’s Horror Aesthetic

It is necessary to begin with an explication of what black women
horror creators are not doing—and such a critique can be found
in the oft-misplaced line of critical inquiry that reads black wom-
en’s’ supernatural writings as magical realism. Magical realism is
“a style of literature which integrates a realist mode of writing
with fantastical or marvelous events treated as perfectly ordinary
occurrences . . . [which] enable the writer to critique belief, mem-
ory, and the imagination as historical forces.”12 Magical realism is
also steeped in Latin American writing culture and tradition—it
has since been applied to other writers of color, Salmon Rushdie
and Toni Morrison. I suggest that the (even partial) application of
magical realism to black women’s supernatural literature is ill-con-
ceived. Morrison herself chafes under the application of magical
realism to her novels because the practice is both lazy and ahis-
torical, for it operates on the assumption that she is not without
a literary tradition.13 Magical realism ignores African Americans’
long-standing oral and literary history of including the supernat-
ural and the fantastical in our narratives, such as Charles Waddell
Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899) and Zora Neale Hurston’s
Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States
(1929).

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 What is necessary, and what the rest of this section ponders
upon, is making an argument for a black woman’s aesthetic of
horror. The search for a black women’s horror aesthetic does not
begin with this chapter. A growing number of black women hor-
ror creators and their fans are examining the ever-expanding list
of texts and have subsequently initiated a discerning conversation
discussing what constitutes black women’s aesthetics in horror.
Many authors—Jewelle Gomez, Jemiah Jefferson, and Nalo
Hopkinson, to name a few—have considered the concept during
individual interviews and roundtable participation. Similarly,
black women in horror film—writers, directors, and actresses—
have begun to outline their thoughts on a black women’s horror
aesthetic. Ashlee Blackwell, creator of the website/blog Graveyard
Shift Sisters, posts an entry that attempts to synthesize the work of
black women and horror films as she ponders: “I am curious as to
why horror isn’t a space where a number of Black women are exer-
cising cinematic efforts in tackling supernatural stories that feel
familiar.”14 Blackwell’s entry does not provide any easy answers,
as she continues to use the blog and its resources to search for
answers. Blackwell’s entry does lend an interesting set of questions
to launch my own inquiry: “What horrors are directly related to
black women? What elements, themes, aesthetic appeal would
make a horror film a solid example of Black female centrality and
agency?”15 Though I work beyond the realm of film to include mul-
tiple texts, Blackwell’s questions ground my contention that the
folkloric horror framework articulates an aesthetic of black women
horror creators.
A black women’s horror aesthetic proves necessary in order to
“show [the reader] how to look” at the works of authors writing
through multiple identities.16 The creators discussed in this chap-
ter are “fashioning an aesthetic of being” through horror literature,
music performance, and film, thereby making the subversive nature
of their work “a force to be made and imagined.”17 Critic bell hooks
argues that “we must learn to see” black aesthetics—I push her
intellectual trajectory further in the application of her argument
for black aesthetic theory to include black women horror writers.

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 Folkloric horror “critically conceptualize[s] a radical aesthetic that
does not negate the powerful place of theory as both the force that
sets up criteria for aesthetic judgment and as vital grounding
that helps make certain work possible, particularly expressive work
that is transgressive and oppositional.”18 The use of fluid fiction
writing techniques specifically applied to the horror genre carves
a space for the authors to interrogate oppressive structures of the
Western hegemony. The women are actively writing against “the
assumption that naturalism or realism [is] more accessible to a mass
audience than abstraction.”19 In truth, the women are revising Nnedi
Okorafor’s notion of “organic fantasy” by engaging horror in using
fiction to reflect greater truths of the African diasporic experience.20
Unfortunately, the implementation of horror has previously led to
the dismissal of the significance of the work of black women horror
creators—a practice that becomes outdated with the construction
of folkloric horror as a black women’s aesthetic of horror.
Folkloric horror is a theoretical framework that attempts to
fill a critical lacuna in the reading of black women horror writers.
Black feminist speculative fiction critics Gwendolyn Pough and
Yolanda Hood have consistently recognized the need to acknowl-
edge the unique nature of horror when black women produce it.21
There is an endeavor in the Pough and Hood piece to recognize
the important relevance of horror—as well as an attempt to name
it “speculative horror”—but it still falls short in incorporating
the multiplicities of identity and genre that guide black women
horror creators. Folkloric horror answers Hood and Pough’s call
for a new hybrid of speculative horror.22
Folkloric horror is comprised of four distinct yet interrelated
facets. First, folkloric horror highlights knowledge systems grounded
in the cosmologies of natal African religions such as Vodou, Obeah,
and Santería. The purposeful act of predicating their fiction within
a non-Western epistemology allows the writers to unceasingly sub-
vert mainstream horror. Subversion continues with the respectful
approach these women bring to these traditional religions—African
epistemologies are centered and treated as, if not commonplace,
then certainly worthy of their place of privilege within their texts.

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 This is markedly different from the derogatory and, dare I say it, dan-
gerous constructions of traditional African religions in mainstream
horror.23 The second aspect of folkloric horror is its acceptance of
spiritual possession as a valid ontology and valued epistemologi-
cal tool. Multiple plot points of the texts analyzed in this chapter
center on ancestors and loas/orishas possessing their descendants
and passing on valuable knowledge in the form of divination and
oral narratives. Religious scholar John S. Mbiti proclaims that,
within African ontologies, “man is a forever creature, but he does
not remain forever man.”24 The protagonists develop complex rela-
tionships with what Mbiti refers to as the living-dead—the newly
dead that are physically dead but are often kept alive as “guardians
of family affairs, traditions, ethics, and activities.”25 The blurring of
the lines between humans and their living-dead ancestors, as well
as the orishas and other spirits, Africanizes the subversive notion
that death is not final and affords diasporic peoples a “personal and
collective immortality,” thus radically revising two mainstream hor-
ror tropes—the ghost and the zombie.26 Next, folkloric horror priv-
ileges the experience of the spiritual bildungsroman, the discovery
of a young woman’s powerful self while under the tutelage of spiri-
tual mentors and elders. This feature acts as a powerful modification
of fantasy literature’s idea of “The Journey.” Patton places the elders
encountered in these texts in the role of “culture bearer,” for these
spiritual mentors “often remind us that the future has a past and
the past must not be forgotten.”27 Finally, folkloric horror builds
upon the previously mentioned qualities to center itself on the real-
ization and celebration of the black spiritual feminine to achieve
a revised literary articulation of the Mambo, the Santera, and the
Obeah woman. It must be noted that the multiple texts explored
in this chapter manifest different gradations of these elements, as
many privilege certain facets over others.

Folkloric Horror in Black Women’s Literature

I have steadily alluded to the presence of horror tropes in classic
black women’s literature that is suffused with ghosts, curses, and

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 psychological terror, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). In this
section, I want to continue my earlier contention by recognizing
and explicating the horror elements in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day
and Erna Brodber’s Louisiana through the folkloric horror frame-
work. Mama Day focuses on the trials of the Day women on the
small autonomous island of Willow Creek. The plot follows the
original maternal ancestor/goddess of the Day family, Sapphira
Wade; the contemporary heir to her supernatural powers, Miranda,
or Mama Day; as well as the powers’ future inheritor Ophelia, or
Cocoa Day. Louisiana centers on the journey of Ella Townsend
and her travels with the Works Progress Administration (WPA)
to rural Louisiana to interview and research the stories of two best
friends—Mammy and Lowly—who communicate their stories
beyond the veil of death. I privilege these two texts because both
are respected exemplars of black women’s literature and are rou-
tinely explored in multiple iterations of black feminist literature.
Both works also share spiritual and supernatural elements explored
in previous analyses that vigorously evaded the unwelcome label
of horror.
Mama Day and Louisiana both privilege epistemes that reflect
traditional African religious cosmologies. The character Mama
Day is a powerful conjure woman with knowledge of healing herbs
and a connection with Willow Springs’ ancestors. Though not as
formally organized as Vodou, Santería, or Candomblé, Hoodoo
(or conjure) contains a set of practices that are heavily grounded
in traditional African belief systems that also incorporate syn-
cretic elements of Christianity. Mama Day casts multiple spells
throughout the novel using her extensive plant knowledge and
access to ancestral communications. Her work is often benevolent
in intention—she includes a fine yellow powder in Cocoa’s letter
to her future husband, George Andrews, to push their connection
further. Mama Day also aids Bernice on multiple occasions in her
quest to conceive a child—she saves Bernice’s ability to reproduce
by healing her from the “fertility” pills that flare her endometrio-
sis, and she ultimately conducts a secret ceremony to impregnate
her with her son. The characterizations of Mama Day, Louise, and

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 Anna reinforce Patton’s suggestion that elders “maintain traditions
and keep communities tied to their past in a way which promotes
communal health.”28 Similarly, Louisiana privileges the less formal
Hoodoo in manifesting natal African religious practices—particu-
larly early in the novel. After Louise’s death, Mama Day and Anna
continue to share their stories with Ella through the gramophone.
Ella’s journey begins and ends with the privileging of ancestral
knowledge, eventually leading her to a divine state rooted in the
African.
It is the privileging of ancestral knowledge that leads to the
acceptance of spiritual possession as a valid ontology and valued
epistemological tool in both Louisiana and Mama Day. Mammy
(Anna) and Lowly (Louise), her matriarchal ancestors, eventually
possess Ella and form a trinity, or a communal “I.”29 The process of
containing three women and three consciousnesses in one body is
easily accepted by Ella’s husband, Reuben, as well as their neigh-
bors in the disenfranchised black community of New Orleans. The
community eventually accepts her not as Ella but as Louisiana—a
play on her possession as Ella embodies “Louise y Ana.” The char-
acter Louisiana becomes a community leader and respected matri-
arch composed of the hard-won knowledge and power bestowed
by her ancestors—she embodies and promotes the notion of
healthy manifestations of African diasporic community. Cocoa is
cursed by a neighbor, Ruby, when she is seen interacting with her
lover, Junior Lee. The curse reveals Cocoa to be possessed by an
evil entity manifested as tiny, clear worms that are crawling inside
her body and sucking the life and sanity out of her very essence.
Everyone in the Day family and the community of Willow
Springs accepts the disturbing ontological presentation that is
Cocoa’s curse, everyone except for her rational and logical engineer
husband, George. It is George’s inability to accept Cocoa’s cursed
nature and to accept the Africanized knowledge being offered to
him that highlights the elements of folkloric horror explored in
Mama Day. George refuses to acknowledge the supernatural ele-
ment causing Cocoa’s sickness—even when he discovers a small
clear worm on the head of his penis after having sex with his wife.

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 George also actively refuses to open himself to the wisdom of the
African when he continuously eschews Mama Day’s advice when
she asks him to bring her an egg from the hen house. George is so
focused on the tangible—attempting and failing to find the egg,
for he is attacked by a rooster—that he is unable and unwilling to
understand Miranda’s request for establishing faith in that which
cannot be seen. Ultimately, George dies for his inability to accept
the power of the spiritual world.
Miranda’s failed attempt to mentor George parallels her more
successful mentorship of her granddaughter, Cocoa, as she comes
into her own as the inheritor of Sapphira Wade’s powers. Both
Cocoa and Ella undergo a spiritual coming of age under the tutelage
of their maternal ancestors, both living and living-dead. Naylor’s
exceptional construction of Cocoa’s husband, George, and her
elusive great-aunt, Miranda Day, has often left analyses of Cocoa
bereft in number and scrutiny. Here, I suggest that the true pur-
pose of the characters and aim of the plot is the spiritual prepara-
tion of Cocoa for eventually replacing Mama Day as a community
matriarch and as the physical manifestation of Sapphira Wade’s
Africanized knowledge and healing powers. Each of Cocoa’s expe-
riences leads her to the final scene of the novel in which she is
visiting George’s grave remarried and a mother preparing to per-
manently settle in Willow Springs and to continue to learn under
Mama Day in a more intense matter. The novel centers on Cocoa’s
spiritual development as she settles on the island of Manhattan,
meets and marries George, brings him home to Willow Springs,
is cursed and possessed by evil, and loses George because of his
inability to let go of rationality. Each moment becomes a trial by
fire in which Cocoa increases her knowledge of herself and comes
to accept her place in the maternal line. It is necessary to note
that the successful campaign to prepare Cocoa for her new life
is achieved through the maneuverings between her living elders,
Mama Day, and her living-dead ancestor, Sapphira Wade.
Ella also undergoes a spiritual bildungsroman as she slowly
metamorphoses from Ella to Louisiana. Ella and her husband
remain in Louisiana after Louisa’s death—choosing to live in

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 New Orleans, a city ripe with spiritual energy. Ella’s initiation
begins with the voices she hears from the WPA gramophone
revealing stories of Mammy’s and Lowly’s lived realities, travels,
and even community work for Marcus Garvey. Ella eventually
undergoes a physical sickness that keeps her bedridden so that
she can undergo the necessary spiritual formation by being pos-
sessed by the two ancestors. The process only takes a few days, and
Louisiana emerges and begins to come into her own. She begins
to offer spiritual advice, ensconces herself into the working-class
communities of New Orleans, converts to vegetarianism, and
begins to dress in all-white.30
Louisiana’s adoption of all-white as her dress code expresses the
fourth and final aspect of folkloric horror, the realization and cel-
ebration of the black spiritual feminine as a revised literary inter-
pretation of the Mambo, the Santera, and the Obeah woman.31
As Louisiana develops, she begins to be associated with Marie
Leveau, a famous Vodou priestess popular since the nineteenth
century. Brodber is purposeful in revising Lousiana’s elucidation

Fig. 9. Two Iyawos of the Lucumi faith.

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 of Madame Marie, for Louisiana’s spirituality is read through the
significance of her all-white dress. Here, Brodber borrows heavily
from traditional African religious practices, specifically the pro-
cess of becoming an Iyawo, the Yoruba word for “bride.” In Vodou,
an advanced practitioner literally marries her personal loa, hence
becoming a bride. In Santeria, advanced practitioners who have
received their “head” or “ori” and are chosen as priests/priestesses
wear white, for they have become newly born in their relation-
ship with their tutelary orisha.32 Louisiana adopts the spiritual
mandates of the Iyawo, who is expected to “observe a year dressed
entirely in white with strict behavioral restrictions including not
being out at night, not taking things from other people’s hands
and not cutting their hair.”33 Hence we see that in privileging the
presence and journey to the black spiritual feminine, Brodber blurs
the lines between the religious delineations and focuses on height-
ening the connection to the African that suffuses them all.
Naylor similarly blurs the denominations of the syncretic man-
ifestations of the African religions by placing her celebratory char-
acter, Mama Day, as a conjure woman, a practitioner of the hazily
defined practices of Hoodoo. Mama Day does not wear white, nor
does she eat a special diet, but she is a mother to every occupant
of Willow Springs. Though she does not have any biological issue,
she has birthed every person on the island through midwifery. She
is both a healer and a spiritual counselor, and her placement in
the community is revered just as any spiritual leader. Yet similar to the
Obeah women of Jamaica, Mama Day can work a root using her
herbal knowledge and imbuing it with the spiritual powers found
in The Other Place. It is The Other Place, the former home of
Sapphira Wade in which the majority of her African-derived pow-
ers can be found, that Naylor celebrates the spiritual feminine of
the black woman. The Other Place is the setting for the ceremony
Bernice undergoes to conceive her son outside the natural laws of
fertility as wielded by Mama Day. Mama Day also demonstrates
noted aspects of the Mambo, for she possesses a magnificent tal-
ent for composing a gris-gris—a New Orleans Vodou spell—and
using it against someone who has attacked her family. Mama Day

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 invokes a gris-gris as she curses Ruby and her house, slapping a
mix of herbs on the house with her open hand as she proclaims a
short invocation that later causes lightning to strike Ruby’s home
and destroy it—with her still in it.
I have used this section to explore how horror has had a steady
presence in what is considered classic black women’s literature.
Close readings of Louisiana and Mama Day also exposed the value
in the critical framework of folkloric horror when used as a tool to
examine a black women’s horror aesthetic. The framework sustains
both early and newer demonstrations of black women’s horror fic-
tion. The next section investigates the value of folkloric horror in
reading works of contemporary black women horror writers.

Folkloric Horror in Contemporary

Black Women Horror Creators
The contemporary women are paying homage even as they revise
elements of folkloric horror. The stories I examine in this section,
“Chocolate Park” by Chesya Burke and “Rosamojo” by Kiini Ibura
Salaam, follow the black feminist literary tradition of tackling dif-
ficult subjects that affect black women’s lived realities—but actively
use horror and supernatural elements to highlight the ways that
African spirituality offers both problems and solutions. Yet they
often bring in contemporary horror tropes such as zombies and
demons to adapt the more classic literatures to their own horror
aesthetic. The most exciting element contemporary writers offer is
the exploration of moral gray areas, for they purposely complicate
the false dichotomies of good and evil.
“Chocolate Park” centers on two families living in a tenement
building in the projects of the inner city and the horrific effects that
drug use and poverty have on these families.34 A family of three sis-
ters—Sable, a young teenager of fifteen with the goal of becoming
a doctor; Ebony, the middle daughter and family caretaker in her
late teens with a good job at the phone company; and Coco (or
Chocolate), a crack addict who has graduated to commercial sex
work in exchange for money and drugs. The girls are learning to

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 survive and cope after the death of their mother. Ebony—in partic-
ular—struggles as she fights to keep her younger sister safe and her
older sister off the streets. The other family consists of Lady Black,
an older black women who is both feared and respected through-
out the community for her dark spiritual talents. Lady Black is also
a woman in mourning, pained by the death of her son, Jacob, at the
hands of the local drug dealer, Torch, and plotting vengeance.
Burke plays with multiple elements from folkloric horror—
she actively celebrates the epistemological benefits of traditional
African religions by constructing several intense scenes in which
she rights the wrongs of the project’s predators by enacting spir-
itual justice. Though the exact nature of her religion is not spec-
ified, Burke describes a nude Lady Black, perspiring in her small
broom closet as she kneels at an alter set lit with red candles as
she chants and uses the likeness of a small yellow doll beset with the
discarded cigarette butt of a local pedophile, Fast Charley.35
The reader experiences Lady Black’s rapture as she dips the doll’s
wax penis into a container of lye and hears the screams of the
sexual predator as she relishes that his flesh will continue to cor-
rode from the penis out until there is nothing left. Again Burke is
subverting folkloric horror’s celebration of the divine feminine, for
Lady Black lacks the inherent goodness of Brodber’s Louisiana as
well as the foundation of love that spurs Naylor’s Mama Day.
The motives of Lady Black are dark, as she is powered by a furi-
ous anger that strips her humanity—her eyes sometimes flash red
whenever she runs into predators such as Fast Charley or Torch.36
Lady Black herself is not evil, but she is not above using evil to
avenge her son’s death and Sable’s rape by killing Torch or pro-
tecting the young girls of the projects by destroying Fast Charley.
Mama Day remains mostly benevolent and commits one act of
vengeance, killing Ruby, as justice for Cocoa. Though Lady Black
is a similar celebration of the black spiritual feminine, she is not at
all benevolent. The very meaning of her real name, Dieula-Marie
Balan, is “God is here,” and demonstrates how Burke is writing
against the expected goodness and generous nature of the black
woman elder as spiritual leader. Though lacking benevolence, Lady

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 Black is still kind; she enjoys serving the community by aiding
those who visit her apartment to seek spiritual counseling and jus-
tice. Burke even hints at the possibility of a spiritual mentorship
between Lady Black and Sable; she even refers to Sable as her
favorite Musketeer out of the pet name she has for the sisters, The
Three Musketeers.
It is Lady Black that Sable runs to after being brutally gang-
raped by Torch and his buddies, for her apartment is a proven safe
space in which she has consistently sought refuge. Lady Black and
Sable share a deep connection; Sable reminds Lady Black of her
younger self, and Sable psychically informs Lady Black that she has
decided to murder Coco. Sable achieves spiritual maturity through
the trauma of rape and ensures her spiritual and physical survival
with the blood sacrifice of her sister, Coco. Sable shoots her twice
in the chest, and they bury her in Chocolate Park as an offer-
ing to the gods, ensuring their freedom from the projects forever.
It is with this final element of folkloric horror—the acceptance of
spiritual possession as a valid ontology and epistemological tool—
that Burke has the most fun and advances contemporary modes of
horror. In the final scenes, Lady Burke offers her blood and even-
tually her life to receive justice from the gods against Torch. The
gods possess the decayed bodies of Lady Black’s son ( Jacob) and
Coco—rendering them murderous zombies that burn him alive,
just as he burned his victims.
Kiini Ibura Salaam is another writer who enjoys cavorting
among the elements of the folkloric horror framework while con-
templating the lived realities that black girls’ experience through
sexual abuse. Her short story “Rosamojo” centers on the title
character, a young girl who is the middle child in a normative
middle-class black family in New [Link] plot follows Rosamojo
as she deals with situations that are far from normal—her father has
begun visiting her at night, and she is terrified that her mother will
discover the horror as well as her burgeoning powers to work pow-
erful gris-gris. Again we are bereft of an exact name for the power-
ful African ceremonies Rosamojo ultimately performs, but Salaam’s
silence marks the need for naming as unnecessary to her specific

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 tale.37 Yet the presence of African religious traditions in the story
demonstrates folkloric horror. Rosamojo grows spiritually without
the guidance of an elder woman mentor; in fact, Salaam highlights
just how alone she is as she lays in her bed, terrified from the assault
her father has just visited upon her. In the morning, Rosa becomes
obsessed with hiding her stained sheets (there are two red marks
on the sheets assumed to be blood) so her mother never suspects
anything untoward. She spends the entire day washing the sheets
in secret, hanging them out to dry away from her neighbor’s prying
eyes, and finally making sure her bed is made correctly.
Rosa is so very alone, and yet she forces herself to grow in her
spiritual gifts. Immediately after her daddy gets off of her, Rosa
keeps a lock of his hair for the gris-gris she’s planning before she
even realizes it. As the cleaned wet sheets dry, Rosa enters her
parents’ bedroom and absconds away with her father’s favorite har-
monica, a newspaper he’s handled that’s covered in his fingerprints,
and his toothpicks. Rosa carefully gathers the materials together,
layering them as she places them in a bowl and alights the entire
pile. It is here that Salaam revises the folkloric horror elements of
spiritual possession and spiritual tutelage—Rosa experiences mul-
tiple moments of intensely advanced spiritual knowledge when
performing the incantations for the spell: “As I squat, watching
it burn, my lips begin to move. Words come spilling out of my
mouth, spelling out a protection prayer I never knew I had in my
head.”38 Rosa has a similar experience later that night as she waits
for her father to come home. She grabs some of her father’s cotton
balls and sits on them as she begs the spirits for protection: “and
those prayers start coming out of me again. This time, they come
so fast, it’s scary. I sit there for hours mumbling to myself, waiting
for daddy to come home.”39 Rosa is both possessed by and learns
from the spirits she calls to for protection. Salaam has remixed and
re-visioned folkloric horror to allude to the possibility of demonic
possession—a stronger horror trope rarely associated with black
women’s literature. Yet Rosa is not possessed by demons, but by
ancestral spirits that are ubiquitous within the physical human
plane.40 Rosa is not possessed by a specifically named spirit or

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 living-dead ancestor but by a spirit that is “depersonalized resi-
due of individual human beings,” or rather “withered individu-
al[s]” that have joined together to manifest a great power over man
found only when they gather in large numbers.41
Similar to Lady Black, Salaam offers us a female protagonist
who commits a questionably moral act—she kills her father. The
protection spell fails to work. Her father enters her room again
that night, and she dumps her belongings out of the gris-gris bag
around her neck and stuffs it with the cotton she has blessed along
with the burnt offerings of her father’s possessions leftover from
the earlier incantation and replaces the bag around her neck: “I put
my hand out in front of me and daddy stops short. I turn my palm
up to the ceiling and imagine daddy’s heart resting in my grasp. The
second I feel the weight of his heart in my hand, I snap my fingers
shut. Daddy gasps and bends over. I squeeze until the thing stops
beating. Daddy stumbles away.” The choice to kill is not without
consequence—even when it can be justified—as experienced with
Lady Black. The spirits do not require Rosa to pay with her life,
but she is banished from her home when her mother figures out
that Rosa is responsible for her father’s death. Rosa must now live
with her grandmother—but she is not alone in her punishment.
Rosa’s greatest consequence is to be haunted by the spirit of her
father: “Rosa, you holdin me back . . . I need you to forgive me so
I can go where I need to go.” But Rosa is weary and just as alone
as she was before everything happened, and she refuses to forgive
her father if he can’t find a way to share the truth with her mother.
The story ends as Rosa declares herself a child unwilling to deal
with grown-up concerns, and here Salaam subverts the celebra-
tion of the spiritual feminine as a knowledgeable priestess of the
Divine. Rosa is knowledgeable, powerful, and enlightened, but she
has fought the entire story for the right to remain a little girl.

Folkloric Horror in Black Women’s Music

The horror themes found in black women’s writing are not unfa-
miliar to those acquainted with their other cultural productions.

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 Music has long been a tool of conjure—from the beat of the djembe
drum to call upon the loas to the gentle melodies of “Bringing in the
Sheaves” as worshippers welcome the Holy Spirit into their midst.
Music possesses the ability to bring the supernatural to an other-
wise ordinary space. Blues music—a secularized revision of gos-
pel—exists within the mythology of guitar player Robert Johnson,
who allegedly sold his soul to Satan at a Mississippi crossroad to
gain untold talent.42 Johnson’s story is the most popular example
of magic, place, and music working together to conjure power, but
many others abound—particularly in the musical performances
and personas of blues singers Memphis Minnie and Nina Simone.
The idea of place is consistently privileged when discussing con-
jure, and black women exist at the ultimate crossroad—the inter-
section of race and gender. I insist that the aforementioned women
are using the concept of the blueswoman to expand folkloric hor-
ror within a musical context to conjure the supernatural out of the
deceptively ordinary. Sonic folkloric horror consists of three char-
acteristics—it is based in the intentional, simultaneous occupation
of the role of the blueswoman and the conjure woman; this simul-
taneity is based in traditional West African religious practices; and,
most important, these black women musicians possess the ability
to conjure through their musical performances.
Conjure, often associated with the Hoodoo, is a set of prac-
tices associated with faith and healing but not with one specific
religion. In her monograph Black Magic: Religion and the African
American Conjuring Tradition (2006), scholar Yvonne P. Chireau
defines conjure as “a magical tradition in which spiritual power
is invoked for various purposes, such as healing, protection, and
self defense.”43 Conjure is mainly practiced by black Americans
descended from Africans enslaved in the United States. Chireau
and other scholars, such as Trudier Harris have long associated
conjure with folklore, terming it a “set of folk beliefs common to
slaves” and yet distinct from the formalities of “black church ritu-
als.”44 Scholar Kameelah L. Martin defines conjure as spirit work:
“I mean to suggest an intimacy with both the healing and harming
ritual practices of African-derived religious practices that evolved

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 in the New World. . . . [It] also involves, as the term suggests,
communication with supernatural entities that in some cultures
may be referred to as ghosts, ha’ints, specters, or apparitions but
across the African diaspora are known as the Ancestors, loa, orisha,
or simply Spirit.”45 Martin, like many other scholars, also connects
the practice of conjure to African American folklore through the
figure of the conjure woman.
The conjure woman is a figure of power whose presence suffuses
the oral narratives of African American folklore and its cultural
products. She is a woman of power who possesses the knowledge
of medicinal herbs, midwifery, magic, and even counseling through
a specific connection to the spirit realm. The conjure woman is
first introduced into the literary consciousness by the author
Charles W. Chesnutt in his collection of stories titled The Conjure
Woman (1899). The book’s structure is a literary reflection of the oral
folklore passed through the generations of African descendants in
the United States.46 Martin furthers Harris’s intimation of the con-
jure woman as a literary archetype throughout her project, but her
most interesting claim is her suggestion that the conjure woman
attains the status of folk hero: “The conjure woman . . . [has] a
history that has roots in black folks[’] culture. The connection of
the conjure woman to a real, tangible cultural expression raises
her to the status of a revered icon, a standing of which neither
the mammy nor the tragic mulatoo can boast. As such, the conjure
woman’s prominence in African American literature reflects the
genealogy of a folk hero who actually lived among the people.”47
Though folk heroes, conjure women were real people held
in both esteem and disdain in African American communities
throughout the United States. Conjure women occupied an inter-
stitial position in society that reflected the intersectional role they
played as midwife, herbalist, fortuneteller, relationship counselor,
and spiritual adviser. The power of foresight was both a gift and a
burden, marking conjure women as outcasts, however revered they
may have been. Chireau determines conjure women as “socially
marginalized” women who were depicted as “outsiders, inhabitants
of the fringes, dwelling within a cultural demimonde.”48 I contend

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 that the marginalized status of the conjure woman mirrors the
simultaneously celebrated and excluded sociocultural status of
the legendary blueswoman. In my quest to explore how black
women performers manifest folkloric horror through the inten-
tionally simultaneous play between the conjure woman and the
blueswoman, I find it necessary to discuss the already established
relationship between the blues and conjure.

Lady Sings the Blues

The historical connection between the blues and conjure stems
from the blues’ status as a musical form derived from the Negro
spirituals of the enslaved. Post-emancipation, the spiritual devel-
oped into the more formalized gospel music, which converged
with the aspirational respectability of the traditional Black
Church.49 The blues are comprised of the viscera that remains—
that which did not survive the spiritual’s metamorphosis into the
more rigid and appropriate boundaries of gospel music. Angela Y.
Davis insists that in the cosmology of enslaved Africans, the secu-
lar and the sacred were far more intertwined: “the sacred universe
was virtually all-embracing” and refused to account for the concept
of such “polar opposites” the postemancipatory black community
attempted to revise.50 Blues ideals incorporated a focus on the
individual—allowing folks to privilege the desires of one above
the many. Blues ideals focused on the corporeal, acknowledging
the importance of the needs of the flesh, the need to dance, to
make love, to drink, and to feel.
Davis contends that the blues “displace[d] sacred music in the
everyday lives of black people,” referring to the songs as “secular
spirituals,” but I want to push back at this contention.51 I assert that
the blues did not displace the sacred; the blues were simply another
form of interacting with the sacred, fulfilling the intrinsic lack of
the complex importance of the body found in the “respectable”
traditional Black Church. The sacrosanct nature of the blues can
be seen in its manifestation and sociocultural importance, which
intertwines with its spiritual significance. Chireau refers to the
blues as “African American theodocity.” While insisting that both

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 the “blues and spirituals are a form of worship and celebration,”
she furthers her argument by referring to blues artists as “musi-
cal ministers.”52 My contentions build upon Chireau’s naming the
relationship between the blues and African American spirituality
as a “paradigm of kinship.”53
The sacramental nature of the blues exists because of the
immense power the blues initiate in the intimacy between the
musician and the audience. I insist that this power is perpetuated
through conjure, another manifestation of the sacred eschewed by
mainstream African American Christian practice. I further posit
that both the blues and conjure simultaneously subvert the false
binaries of institutionalized black Christianity. Martin insists
that there is “a symbiotic relationship between conjure and blues
music that originated in postemancipation cultural production.”54
Blues music contains “songs of power” and often acted as a “ves-
sel through which conjure reached a broad audience.”55 Chireau,
Martin, and Davis use their projects for in-depth examinations of
the presence of conjure in blues music. Chireau reads blues songs
for explicit ingredients for conjure spells such as Lizzie Miles’s
Shootin’ Star Blues (1928), even as Davis connects the themes of
conjure in the lyrics and titles of blues songs with specific West
African cultural practices.56 Martin’s exploration of conjure and
the blues goes even further, as she discusses specific conjurers of
the day immortalized in song and studies how themes of conjure
suffused blues music: “Blues music in many ways immortalizes not
only conjure practice but also the Hoodoo doctors and conjure
women who were famously recognized for their power.”57 The rest
of this chapter examines what most piques my critical interest
while simultaneously filling a gap in the scholarship, the symbiotic
relationship between the blueswoman and the conjure woman.

Existing at the Crossroads of

Blueswoman and Conjure Woman
Farah Jasmine Griffin posits that the voice of the black woman
has the power to cast spells.58 It is here I want to explore the
nuances of how certain black women performers simultaneously

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 draw upon and embody the blueswoman and the conjure woman,
thus manifesting folkloric horror. Such a feat is not as far-fetched
as it seems. The previous section discussed the well-established
kinship between the blues and conjure; it is only a small step to
examining the interweaving of these traditions by black women
entertainers. Martin intimates: “conjure and the blues share a more
reciprocal relationship, one extending a hand to help the other.
Blues music is one vessel through which conjure has reached a
broad audience,” and blueswoman purposely “incorporated con-
jure sensibilities” to became popular ambassadors of the black
woman–centered belief. In truth, the blueswoman and the conjure
woman occupy a similarly complex social status within the African
American community. Both sets of women were communal out-
casts with protofeminist ideologies who also privileged communal
healing.
Blueswomen and conjure women rejected the values of the
mainstream African American culture and beliefs. These women
existed on the margins of society because they were often asso-
ciated with practices outside the morays of the traditional Black
Church—a prominent fixture in the larger community. Conjure
women, though the majority of their clients were regular church
attendees, operated outside of what many considered Christian
grace. Their belief in forces connecting back to traditional West
African religious practices forced them outside of the cultural
milieu. Likewise, blueswomen were considered immoral and
dangerous because of their open celebration of excess and bodily
pleasures—sexuality was a prominent theme in blues music.59
Other themes included “advice to other women; alcohol; betrayal
or abandonment; broken or failed love affairs; death; departure;
dilemma of staying with a man or returning to family; disease and
afflictions; erotica; hell; homosexuality; infidelity; injustice; jail and
serving time; loss of lover; love; men; mistreatment; murder; other
woman; poverty; promiscuity; sadness; sex; suicide; supernatural;
trains; traveling; unfaithfulness; vengeance; weariness, depression,
and disillusionment; weight loss.”60 Davis further highlights how
none of these themes included “children, domestic life, husband,

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 and marriage.”61 The noted lack of fit blueswomen displayed with
regard to the respectable black woman gives fertile reasoning for
their status as social outcasts.
The conjure woman and the blueswoman showed an agency
centered in early black feminist beliefs and practices. The conjure
woman trafficked in the powers associated with the black fem-
inine. The prominent position as conjurer was gender neutral,
open to folks across the gender spectrum. The marginalized sta-
tus of the conjure woman also offered economic freedom, allow-
ing “some practitioners to accumulate material wealth from their
professions.”62 This was in direct opposition to the patriarchal
framework of the African American church in which men were
in leadership positions and were often given economic and socio-
cultural freedom through the economic sacrifice of black women.
Conjure women also trafficked in spells or gris-gris that privileged
the essence of womanhood. A popular remedy for a straying lover
is to feed him a meal with a red sauce that hides the menstrual
blood the woman has introduced to the meal. Davis remains fas-
cinated by the “hints of feminist attitudes” that suffuse the perfor-
mances of blueswomen as she demonstrates their participation in
the construction of oral feminist traditions. Blueswomen could be
economic powerhouses, at times experiencing a financial indepen-
dence so often denied postemancipatory black women. But the
highlight of the blueswoman’s black feminist tradition remains her
sexual freedom. These women eschewed marriage and husbands
and reveled in bragging about the prowess of their many lovers,
some of whom were female. Blueswomen also displayed a pro-
tofeminist independence of spirit by living life in the fast lane: “All
of them women who’d sing the blues would curse, be drunk, just sit
up and talk a lot of shit, man. What foul language!”63
The final theme that draws both blueswomen and conjure
women together is their belief and participation in the healing
powers of their gifts. There exists more clarity in how conjure
women were often read as healers “who viewed healing as a sacred
duty.”64 Some were midwives and were often more affordable
options to medical doctors for minor ailments given their talent

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 for herbs and tonics. Conjure women were also spiritual counsel-
ors, providing mental and emotional healing to their customers
as well. Martin connects conjure itself as a cure for the condition
of the blues. Blueswomen were healers who focused “on the fix-
ing of relationships gone awry and the resolution of oppressive
romantic entanglements.”65 Blueswomen would often be termed
as “preachin’ the blues,” as their sermons on love—of the self as
well as others—demonstrated the healing potential in connecting
“spiritual and sexual joy.”66 Ultimately, blueswomen privileged the
psychological and spiritual wellness of their audience by expelling
their blues by naming it, singing it, and taking away its power.

Sonic Folkloric Horror in Black Women’s

Musical Performance
I use the language of Daphne Brooks to discuss the theoretically
revolutionary and politically savvy ways in which these black
women performed sonic folkloric horror by “conflat[ing] and
pervert[ing] the boundaries of ” the blueswoman and the con-
jure woman. Their simultaneous embodiment of the blueswoman
and the conjure woman “translat[es] alienation into [a] self-
actualizing performance” and ultimately “revis[es] the black cultural
imaginary.”67 Memphis Minnie and Nina Simone interweave their
voice and their instrument to expand the possibilities of previously
limited constructions of black femininity. These women possess
a remarkable talent for remixing and revising their “condition of
social, political, and cultural alterity” to manifest sonic folkloric
horror. The musical manifestation of folkloric horror contains vary-
ing degrees of the simultaneous embodiment of the blueswoman
and the conjure woman. This embodiment occurs in musical per-
formances that are marked by one or more specific acts of conjur-
ing a racially gendered and defined performance self-articulation
through the use of their voice accompanied by instrumentation
conducted by the performer. Memphis Minnie conjures with her
guitar, and Nina Simone conjures with her piano.

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 Memphis Minnie Conjures the Hoodoo Lady
Memphis Minnie predates Robert Johnson, as she survived the
Great Depression as a musician and went on to record music over
a thirty-year span of the twentieth century.68 Minnie was a pio-
neer who occupied the liminal space between the sophisticated
women of the classic blues era and the unsophisticated men of
the latter country blues era.69 The majority of previous scholar-
ship on blueswomen has focused on blues singers and not Minnie,
known for her prowess with her guitar and her ability to “play like
a man.”70 An analysis of Minnie’s prolific music writing and per-
formance career spanning three decades proves her no less a blues-
woman. The majority of the songs she performed, such as “Black
Cat Blues,” “Crazy Crying Blues,” and “In My Girlish Days,” were
written and composed by Minnie herself.71 Minnie also assumed
the protofeminist, independent, and fast-paced lifestyle of a blues-
woman: “Yeah Minnie shot craps like a man, playing those cards,
man, raising all kinds of hell.”72 Yet it was in her musical perfor-
mance that Memphis Minnie would overlay the persona of con-
jure woman to intersect with her reality as a blueswoman.
In her performance of “Hoodoo Lady” Memphis Minnie uses
her guitar to conjure a revision of the black cultural imaginary
that highlights her otherness and otherworldly qualities. “Hoodoo
Lady” is a song in which Minnie masterfully flows from first to
third person throughout the lyrics and guitar riffs as easily as
she oscillates in the role of blueswoman and conjure woman (see
Appendix). When singing the verses, Minnie is speaking to the
Hoodoo lady in the third person, but when speaking and play-
ing the guitar riffs throughout, Minnie is embodying the Hoodoo
lady as conjure woman. As previously established, a Hoodoo
lady is a woman of power who commands respect. Minnie and
her intended audience are well aware of the specialized status of
a Hoodoo woman, and she intentionally blurs notions of power
as well as the lines between the Self and the Other. Minnie is
clear that she considers herself both/and while eschewing the false
binary of either/or.

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 The song itself is a meditation on power as seen through the
framework of conjure while demonstrating Minnie’s lyrical dex-
terity. In the first verse, Minnie is respectful in speaking to the
Hoodoo lady, asking “how do you do?” as she acknowledges the
breadth of her conjuring abilities, “They tell me you take a boot
and turn it into a brand new shoe.” Minnie also possesses a star-
tling clarity in just exactly what a danger the Hoodoo lady presents
to her as she wails: “Don’t put that thing on me/’Cause I’m going
back to Tennessee.” It is never clear just what that “thing” is—but
Minnie’s knowledgeable audience is aware that it infers a special
sort of conjuring that doesn’t result in anything good or pleasur-
able. Though the phrase “Don’t put that thing on me/’Cause I’m
going back to Tennessee” occurs in each verse of the song, here it
is a beseeching request. I suggest that it changes in meaning in
each of the three stanza movements, gaining agency and power
throughout as Minnie conjures in the guitar riffs throughout the
song. In the second stanza—still the first of three song move-
ments—Minnie pleads her case: “I’m sitting here, broke, and I
ain’t got a dime” but again only after acknowledging the godlike
powers of the Hoodoo lady, “you can turn water to wine.” Her
request, though still polite, is no longer beseeching: “You ought to
put something in these dukes of mine.”
It is in the guitar riffs that power imbalances shift. Minnie
is specifically using her specialized strumming techniques as an
empowering act of conjure and self-articulation. Bluesman Willie
Moore said that Minnie “could make a guitar talk.”73 Minnie was
known for her skill at “Spanish tuning,” for “though fingerpicking,
she plays with the speed and finesse of a flatpicker.”74 It is nec-
essary to note that Minnie’s deft guitar playing builds upon her
aforementioned verbal agility. She introduces her guitar solo with
the sly aside: “Boy you better watch it because she’s tricky.” The
“she” is referring to Minnie herself, and the tricks she possesses
include the ability to conjure power and cast spells with her nimble
fingers. Scholar Gabriel Solis reads these particular guitar solos as
a palimpsest.75 Langston Hughes described the rhythm of her gui-
tar as being older than her “most remote ancestor.76 Both recognize

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 the influence of the West African conjuring tradition in Minnie’s
guitar solos. Minnie is showing off while gaining agency and the
confidence to confront the Hoodoo lady as an equal and demand
the use of her powers.
In the second movement of the song, just after the first guitar
riff and in the third and fourth stanzas, Memphis Minnie becomes
brash in her (now) demands of the Hoodoo lady. There is no longer
an acknowledgment of the breadth of her powers to assuage her
ego, for Minnie’s own sense of self has grown. Minnie now cuts to
the quick in her demands: “I want you to unlock my door.” Minnie’s
confidence in her own conjuring abilities has grown so much that
she is ordering this powerful lady around with no adherence to
respectful compliance. The fourth stanza begins with “Now look-a
here, Hoodoo lady” and glides right into her most fervent and spe-
cific demand yet: “Bring my man back home but don’t let him stay
all night.” The gall of this request cannot be overstated. Minnie
wants the Hoodoo lady to find her man, bring him to her, stick
around until after he has serviced Minnie as she sees fit, and then to
get rid of him! Minnie slides into another guitar solo/conjuring ses-
sion before moving into the third and final movement of the song.
The final stanza begins “Why look-a here, Hoodoo lady” as
Minnie insists that she and the Hoodoo lady are now at the very
least equals in conjuring power and community standing: “I’m your
friend” as she orders her to “come back again.” The double-talk and
signifying are remarkable and only possible through the acts of
conjuring stirred by Minnie’s finesse with the guitar. The last few
lines, though a final repetition of the lines found in each stanza
throughout the song, have developed in meaning. What was once
a beseeching request has become an admonishment, even a dare in
its subversive meaning. “Don’t put that thing on me” has changed
to possess a secondary meaning of “Don’t [you dare] put that thing
on me/’Cause I’m going back to Tennessee.” Her final words are
“Boys, I’m scared of her” but the smirk in her voice demonstrates
the reality that Minnie is anything but scared of the Hoodoo lady,
and perhaps suggests that it is the Hoodoo lady who should be
afraid of Minnie and her guitar. Memphis Minnie’s verbal acuity

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 builds upon her guitar acumen as the two expressive manifestations
interlock and magnify her conjuring power. Ultimately, Memphis
Minnie’s “Hoodoo Lady” is an impressive demonstration of con-
jure’s potential for self-articulation in a powerful rebuttal of her
supposed marginalized status.

Nina Simone Casts a Spell

In a description of Nina Simone’s 1964 Carnegie Hall perfor-
mance of the classic aria “Pirate Jenney,” scholar Daphne Brooks
posits that Simone’s performance “creates a productive access that
obfuscates the putative transparency of the black female singer.”77
Simone is a performer who defies singularity in the reading of
her work; it is necessary to wrangle with the complexities of her
performances—her intentional voice inflections and modulations
and the intensity—or lack thereof—of her piano chord choices.
But unlike Memphis Minnie, we also have the benefit of video
recordings of her live performances and can therefore layer her
sartorial choices and facial expressions. Audiovisual equipment
allows us to experience how Simone performed with her entire
being; scholar Danielle Heard denotes Simone a “performance
artist” and demands we “consider her theatricality in addition to
her musicianship and celebrity.”78 I am most interested in reading
Simone’s conjuration of a politics of obfuscation, disruption, and
agitation through her simultaneity of embodying the blueswoman
and the conjure woman in her 1965 live European cover of Jalacy
Hawkins’s “I’ll Put a Spell On You” (1956).
There is no dispute in Simone’s standing as a blueswoman,
though the title is one of many she can rightfully claim. Nina
Simone was a classically trained pianist who was proficient in
classical music, jazz, and the blues. Simone devotes an entire 1967
album, Nina Simone Sings the Blues, to exploring her love and admi-
ration for the blues. It contains one of her biggest hits, “I Want a
Little Sugar in My Bowl,” a revision of blueswoman Bessie Smith’s
“Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl” (1931).79 Apart from singing the
blues, Simone also lived the privileged but marginalized life of the
earlier blueswoman. Her music afforded her economic freedom,

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 travel, and uninhibited creative and political expression, as seen in
a short interview clip in which Simone proclaims that she would
have chosen to be a “killer” in the fight for black civil rights and
laments that all she has is her music.80 Her music also margin-
alized her as an artist, for she paid dearly for privileging music
and performances that centered on black liberation. Additionally,
Simone’s identity as a blueswoman failed to protect her from the
harsh realities of black womanhood, as she was a victim of both
domestic violence and untreated mental illness.81
Nina Simone’s recorded version of “I’ll Put a Spell On You” is
a muted realization of Hawkins’s (in)famously wild composition.82
Gabriel Solis describes that the producers of the album version
wanted the song to be sexy and sultry, features that certainly come
through. The album version is narrowly confined to a reading that
centers a wronged woman threatening her unfaithful male lover—
she refers to him in her ad-libs with the affectation “Daddy.”
In her 1965 live performance of “I’ll Put a Spell On You”
Simone slips into the role of conjure woman as a directly sub-
versive counter to the recorded album version of the very same
song.83 The sultry purr from the album is gone. The performance
begins with strong, sure chords that are clearly building toward a
coming crescendo. The introductory chords demand the audience’s
patience, for they continue almost twenty seconds of an anticipa-
tory viewing of Simone’s face. Simone refuses to make direct eye
contact throughout the performance. She looks down but not at
her fingers moving across the keys. She looks away but never at
the camera or at any other person in her live viewing audience. She
exhibits control and power by refusing everyone her gaze. Simone
breaks the tension with the lowly growled proclamation: “I’ll Put
a Spell on You.” Heard insists that Simone’s “ugly growl” is inten-
tional and layered in its application: “The [growl] . . . invokes the
black feminist impulse of the blues to publicly state one’s pain and
anger . . . while the [ugly] resonates with the shock factor of free
jazz’s sonic experimentation and its sounding of black nationalist
rage.”84 Simone’s disruptive performance denies peace and com-
placency to the audience.

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 The depth and variance of Simone’s voice affectations, cou-
pled with the intricacies of her piano play, transcend the words of
the song. “I’ll Put a Spell On You” is no longer a threat. Simone’s
manifestation of sonic folkloric horror—the spell is literally
being conjured in the performance. We must heed the words of
Heard in taking the whole of Simone’s presence into the read-
ing; she is dressed in then contemporary West African fashion in
what appears to be a dress and, most important, a relaxed gele—a
Yoruban head wrap. Thus, Simone’s fashion choices link her to the
West African influence in her effort to conjure onstage. It is also
necessary to continuously note Simone’s visage throughout the
performance. Her face is relaxed yet not open. There is no smile
to welcome her audience into her world, into her performance.
Simone’s visage is not only serious, it is focused, for a conjure
woman needs the utmost concentration in working a spell. At dif-
ferent moments disgust, commitment, and even frustration flash
across Simone’s face, as she is hard at work and devoted to seeing
this particular task through to fruition. Here, there is a marked
difference between a blueswoman singing about conjure—as seen
in Ma’ Rainey’s “Louisiana Hoodoo Blues”—and a blueswoman
who is simultaneously a conjure woman, as seen in Simone’s live
performance.

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 Conclusion
Sycorax’s Power of Revision
Reconstructing Black Women’s Counternarratives

You know who the real tempest is, don’t you?

The real storm? Is our mother Sycorax.
—Nalo Hopkinson’s “Shift”

We want to be our own monsters.

—Walidah Imarisha

The 2016 release of Beyoncé’s audiovisual album Lemonade height-

ens the need for the development of a black women’s horror aes-
thetic. The visuals are suffused with the presence of Santeria’s orishas,
Vodou’s loas, and West African monstrous goddesses such as Mami
Wata. The chapter “Anger” features the words of poet Warsan
Shire being read by Beyoncé over the black and white visuals fea-
turing a circle of black women dressed in white and writhing in the
manner of one large, amorphous being. The audiovisual construc-
tion focuses on the problematic indistinguishability of one black
woman from another by those who render them invisible and/or
inconsequential.
Though the stanza I am most interested in focuses on the
infidelity of the Beyoncé character’s lover, it alludes to the larger
intracommunal implications of failing to see black women as

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 Fig. 10. Beyoncé, Lemonade (2016).

individuals. Beyoncé reads: “If this what you truly want. I can wear
her skin . . . over mine.” This interlude is easily misread as an act
of violence against the other woman, forcing her to pay the adul-
terous price for her husband’s straying of affection. In a blogpost
titled “Can Beyoncé Wear Another Woman’s Skin and Still Be a
Feminist Icon?” writer and novelist Malaka Grant accuses Beyoncé
of advocating for violence against women, making her no better
than the many male artists who have made millions off of the
literal blood of women. Grant ultimately declares that Beyoncé’s
relationship with the other woman “is out of step.”1 Grant’s read-
ing is understandable but also symptomatic of reading black wom-
en’s creative texts without the consideration of horror frameworks.
A consideration of horror frameworks and folklore of the
African diaspora would immediately bring in a discussion of the
Boo Hag.2 The Boo Hag is a monster from Gullah folklore that
features a skinless woman who borrows the skin of others until
she has absorbed their entire essence.3 Often misappropriated as
a revision of the European vampire, the Boo Hag slips into one’s
bedroom each night until a person has expired. The Boo Hag can
be easily distracted by posting a straw broom by one’s bed. The
Hag is compelled to count each piece of straw until the sun comes
up and destroys her at dawn. The compulsion to wear another’s

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 skin, to use “her hands as gloves,” becomes a creative way in which
the Beyoncé character expresses her anxiety at being replaceable
and indistinguishable from any other woman her lover encounters.
Hence, Beyoncé uses the grotesque and the terrifying to ultimately
alleviate her fears—a coping mechanism denied black women for
far too long.
This text began as a search and rescue mission for Sycorax—
but in truth this volume only reveals how she saves herself. Time
and again Sycorax is misread as a tool of destruction, the mis-
reading occurs in only reading one part of her destiny. Sycorax
is also a powerful tool of reconstruction in particularly subversive
frameworks. The first two chapters of the project analyzed how
Sycorax has been consistently ignored—by both mainstream hor-
ror and black feminist theoretical frameworks. It proved easy to
eschew such a mysterious and volatile concept as black women
horror creators worry the lines of the already marginalized areas
of inquiry, horror studies, and black feminist theory. These par-
ticular areas of study were blind to the reconstructive and revolu-
tionary potential embodied in Sycorax. The final two chapters of
this text explored those qualities in the articulation and develop of
fluid fiction—a more apt term for the complexities found in black
women’s genre writing. Sycorax’s most seditious delineation—with
regard to Western hegemonic structures—solidifies in the fourth
chapter’s enunciation of folkloric horror, a critical framework that
highlights the authority black women take to articulate intersec-
tions of African ontologies and epistemologies as well as gender,
culture, and the supernatural. The creators analyzed in that fourth
chapter model the character Sycorax’s ability to proclaim author-
ity and present it in such a way that directly contradicts white,
male, Christian hegemonies. Finally, it is necessary to note that
Sycorax herself exists beyond the boundary of death—in fact, it is
as a spiritual ancestor that she becomes more powerful. Her ability
to move beyond the physical limits of her earthly body even as
she strengthens her influence over the mortal world emphasizes
her position as a highly favored literary ancestor for black women
horror creators—even amid her heretofore limited construction

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 as a tertiary and marginalized character in Shakespeare’s text. My
work here has displayed Sycorax’s uncanny ability to break out of
her limited constituency through traditional African ontologies.
Sycorax exemplifies Bonnie Berthold’s insistence that the dead are
not dead—she continues to live on.
Faced with a Sycorax that refuses to stay dead, this conclusion
explores the complexities of how black women horror writers offer
tribute. The continuing celebration of the horror genre through a
black feminist framework is only the beginning. Future endeav-
ors must further her presence while minimizing her absence in
the absent presence in which she was trapped with such constric-
tive characterizations. Black women horror creators must support
Sycorax’s continued growth as an epistemological tool of estab-
lishing counternarratives. Nalo Hopkinson, an author whose work
I explored in the third chapter of this book, provides a model for
incorporating, pushing, and revising Sycorax in her latest short
story, “Shift.”4
The story centers on the complex relationships between
Sycorax; her son, Caliban; and her daughter, Ariel. It is told in a
first-person narrative form, with Ariel and Caliban alternating in
moving the story forward.
Hopkinson keeps the trope of Sycorax being a woman of
African descent, but she complicates it by making her characteri-
zation a North African woman—specifically modeling her on the
well-established Lebanese communities that exist on the island of
Jamaica. Similarly, Sycorax is grounded in horror dynamics; she
haunts Caliban and remains a sorceress filled with infinite powers,
“She’s coming. Sycorax is coming for you. . . . Oh, there will be so
much fun when she has you again!” Sycorax begins as a ghostly
presence, a haint even as she slowly begins to incarnate through-
out the story culminating in her magnanimous appearance four
pages from the end of the story. Sycorax’s absent presence in the
lives of her children hearkens back to her problematic status in
The Tempest, yet Hopkinson subverts Shakespeare by giving her
both voice and embodiment. Hopkinson also pointedly initiates
Sycorax’s incarnation as Mami Wata, an African water deity that

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 established the basic myths surrounding mermaids, including the
water orishas Yemaja and Oshun, and is still an object of worship
for many traditional African religions, most especially Vodoun.5
Hopkinson continues to push Sycorax’s African boundaries as
she demands that her children refer to her as Scylla, or Charybdis
incorporates European concepts of female water deities.6 And
yet both are subsumed under Hopkinson’s reading of Sycorax as
Mami Watu. She is Charybdis, the powerful whirlpool; Mami
Wata, a beloved deity; and Scylla, the feminized monster that
threatens to consume men on their life journey. Sycorax comes to
embody water, which exists everywhere—but most especially, she
is tempestuous water, rapidly moving with unpredictable purpose:
“She has wrapped an ocean wave about her like a shawl. . . . Her
writing hair foams white over her shoulders. . . . The tsunami of
Sycorax’s hips overflows her watery seat. Her myriad split tails are
flicking. . . . With one of them, she scratches around her navel.”7 Yet
even as Sycorax has been demonized and discarded, her appearance
at the end of the story is not simply to scold her children—“Ariel,
Caliban: stop that squabbling or I’ll bind you both up in a split tree
forever”—but to also reveal the love she bestows upon her children
and her weariness at rescuing them from their messy and wanton
lives: “Running home to Mama, leaving me with the mess he’s
[Caliban] made. . . . I’m getting too old to play surrogate mother
to your spawn. . . . Grannie gets to do the honours. He has brought
me frog children and dog children, baby mack daddies and crack
babies. Brings his offspring to me, and then runs away again. And
I’m getting tired of it . . . and I’m more than tired of his sister’s tale
tattling.”8 Sycorax is a creature of power who is incarnated and
given voice—but even then, her anger, her maelstrom, all derives
from a place of love. She wants more and better for her children—
for them to grow up and beyond where they are in need of her
constant surveillance and approval: “I want you to stop pestering
your brother,” she demands of Ariel.9 What is there in the silence
is that Sycorax wants her daughter to grow beyond petty sibling
rivalry to develop a life filled with loves of her own. She commands
of Caliban while pointing a tentacle in his direction, “you need to

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 stop bringing me the fallouts from your sorry love life.”10 Sycorax
is silently demanding that her beloved son mature and cease his
failed attempts at finding himself between every pair of cream-
colored thighs he encounters. Hopkinson succeeds in complicat-
ing Sycorax showing her growth in complexity as she expands the
number of facets readers are welcome to read in her characteriza-
tion of such a historically fearsome character.
Contemporary black women horror creators continue to
actively revise both horror and black feminist literature in ways
that literary criticism has failed to acknowledge. Increasing the
breadth of works available can only aid in the further develop-
ment of a black women’s horror aesthetic that challenges staid the-
ories and rewrites static genres. The work must continue with the
creating a database of annotated bibliographic information and
supporting the frameworks that increase the number and quality
of horror texts written by black women, strengthening the power
and complexity of Sycorax’s presence in literature, music, film, and
criticism.

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 Appendix
Creative Work Summary

28 Days Later (2002) is a science fiction horror film directed by

Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland. It stars Cillian Murphy
as Jim, Naomie Harris as Selena, Brenda Gleeson as Frank, Megan
Burns as Hannah, and Christopher Eccleston as Major West. The
characters navigate a postapocalyptic, quarantined Britain four
weeks after a deadly viral outbreak that makes humans enraged,
violent, and zombielike. Random survivors Jim, Selena, Frank,
and Hannah band together searching for safety. Frank is infected,
but the remaining group is “rescued” by soldiers under the com-
mand of Major West. Major West has decided that the solution
to the situation is to wait out the infection and, meanwhile, rape
women in order to repopulate the world. The group escapes, but
Jim is injured. The film cuts to twenty-eight days after their escape,
showing the characters on the mend and attempting to make con-
tact with Finnish jets flying overhead.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a science fiction horror film directed

by Stanley Kubrick and written by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C.
Clarke. It stars Keir Dullea as Dr. Dave Bowman, Gary Lockwood
as Dr. Frank Poole, and William Sylvester as Dr. Heywood R.
Floyd. A monolith is discovered on the moon emitting a radio
signal aimed at Jupiter. A secretive Jupiter mission is devised,
headed by Dr. Bowman and Dr. Poole and accompanied by a
few other scientists and HAL 9000, the ship’s sentient computer.

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 HAL is thought to be “incapable of error,” but astronauts begin
to doubt this and plan to unplug him. HAL knows about their
plan and preemptively lashes out, killing all except Dr. Bowman.
Dr. Bowman defeats HAL and continues to Jupiter, where he
encounters another monolith and experiences bizarre space/time
marvels, which Kubrick and Clarke left open-ended for a variety
of interpretations.

Abby (1974) is a Blaxploitation horror film directed by William

Girdler and written by William Girdler and Gordon Cornell
Layne. It stars Carol Speed as Abby, a marriage counselor; William
Marshall as Dr. Williams, a professor of archaeology; and Terry
Carter as Detective Emmet, Dr. William’s son and Abby’s hus-
band. On an expedition in Africa, Dr. Williams releases a Nigerian
spirit of sexuality (possibly Eshu, although this point is left ambig-
uous), which then possesses Abby. Abby must undergo a Yoruba
exorcism in order to be free of the spirit.

Tananarive Due’s African Immortals series includes four titles: My

Soul to Keep (1998), The Living Blood (2002), Blood Colony (2008),
and My Soul to Take (2011). In Due’s own words, “The series follows
the lives of mortals and immortals who have contact with Living
Blood that can heal any ailment almost instantly, examining issues
of life, loss, and mortality.” My Soul to Keep opens the series, with
Jessica and David, a couple very much in love but racked with grief
when Jessica’s family and friends begin meeting violent and sud-
den ends. David reveals that he is from an Ethiopian sect who, 400
years ago, made a pact to become immortal; this secret is one that
they are willing to protect at all cost. Jessica must make impossi-
ble choices for herself, her daughters, and her husband. Four years
later, in The Living Blood, Jessica is still reeling from the death of
her husband and first daughter; but she must now protect her sec-
ond daughter, Fana, from her own fate, destined by her father’s
legacy and the living blood that instills her with supernatural pow-
ers. Blood Colony continues Fana’s story, as she uses her powers
to help peddle Glow, a derivative of immortal blood that heals

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 all ailments, and battle those who attempt to use her to fulfill an
ancient prophecy. My Soul to Take is the final installment of Fana’s
story, in which she is entangled in a battle of love, duty, and desires.
This last novel in the series also brings in characters from Due’s
Joplin’s Ghost.

An American Werewolf in London (1981) is a comedy horror film

written and directed by John Landis and starring David Naughton
as David Kessler, Jenny Agutter as Nurse Alex Price, and Griffin
Dunne as Jack Goodman. David and Jack are two American col-
lege students backpacking through the English countryside late
one night, despite being warned by locals not to do so, when they
are attacked by a werewolf. Jack is killed, and David is injured and
taken to London, where he suffers hallucinations of his dead friend.
He and Nurse Alex develop a crush on each other, but their tryst is
interrupted by frequent visitations of dead Jack, pleading for David
to take his own life before the full moon. The full moon rises, and
David turns into a werewolf, going on a rampage through London.
He is eventually killed by the police, but only after a tearful plea
from Alex fails to compose him.

Jay Anson’s novel The Amityville Horror (1977) claims to be a true

story, although this claim has caused controversy. What is verifiable
is that on November 13, 1974, at the 112 Ocean Avenue residence
in Amityville, Long Island, New York, Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot and
killed his wife and five children. In December of the following year,
the Lutz family move into the Dutch Colonial house with the now
iconic gambrel roof, but they only remain for twenty-eight days.
The Lutzes knew about the murders, so they ask Father Mancuso
to bless the house. While administering holy water and reciting
the blessing, Father Mancuso hears a male voice telling him to “get
out.” Later on the phone, he tries to warn the Lutzes to stay out of
the second-floor bedroom, but his warning is cut short from static
on the line. What is not verifiable is what the Lutz family experi-
enced the following month. Various disturbing phenomena occur
until mid-January, when they abruptly leave, unable to handle

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 the strange and often vindictive forces at work. Sequels and films
have been based off of their account.

Angel (1999–2004) is a television show spinoff of the Buffy the

Vampire Slayer series created by Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt.
It stars David Boreanaz as Angel and Charisma Carpenter as
Cordelia. The show follows the conflicted character Angel (from
Buffy the Vampire Slayer), who constantly wars within himself
because he is a vampire with a human soul. He seeks redemption
of his past sins by playing detective and fending for the destitute
with his helpers, Cordelia and other characters. In the fourth sea-
son of Angel (2002), Jasmine, portrayed by Charisma Carpenter
and Gina Torres, is a powerful goddess who leaches off of human
hosts, draining them of life force. She possesses different charac-
ters, including Cordelia, and masterminds much of the mischief in
seasons one through four.

Angel Heart (1987) is a horror film written and directed Alan Parker
and based on the novel Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg. It
stars Mickey Rourke as Harry Angel, Robert De Niro as Louis
Cyphre, and Lisa Bonet as Epiphany Proudfoot. Harry, a New
York City private investigator, is hired by Louis Cyphre to find
Johnny Favorite, a famous jazz singer whom Louis helped achieve
fame. Johnny was last seen at a hospital, where he was being treated
for shell shock for twelve years. Harry discovers he is not there and
that a doctor was bribed to say he was. The doctor whom Harry is
interrogating is found dead shortly after being questioned. Harry
tracks more clues to New Orleans, where Johnny’s lover, band
member, and daughter are, but they turn up dead, too, after Harry
questions them. Harry discovers that Johnny had made a deal with
the devil—his soul in exchange for fame—but then performed
a ritual to hide from the devil and keep the devil from collect-
ing his due, which involved killing a soldier and eating his heart.
His client shows up, and Harry figures out that Louis Cyphre is a
homophone for Lucifer. It is revealed that Harry is Johnny and has
actually been the one killing everyone in a fugue state.

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 Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series (1993–)
is set in a parallel universe where the supernatural is not cloaked,
but openly part of everyone’s reality, as exhibited by Anita Blake’s
profession. Anita is a professional vampire executioner, an anima-
tor (brings the dead back to life), and supernatural consultant for
the police. She is also of German and Mexican descent and carries
multiple strains of the lycanthropy virus, including wolf, leopard,
lion, hyena, and tiger. The series of more than twenty-five books,
which has also spawned into a comic book series as well as short
stories, follows Anita as she solves supernatural crimes, navigates
the personal and the political, and grows from viewing supernatu-
ral creatures as suspect to seeing supernatural creatures as possibly
friends and even romantic partners.

Nisi Shawl’s “At the Huts of Ajala” (2000) was published in Dark
Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora.

AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004) is a science fiction action/adven-

ture horror film written and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson with
story by Dan O’Bannon, Ronald Shusett, Jim Thomas, and John
Thomas. The film is a crossover of the Alien and Predator fran-
chises, starring Sanaa Lathan as Alexa, the expert Arctic guide;
Lance Henriksen as Charles, the billionaire archaeologist mis-
sion sponsor; and Raoul Bova as Sebastian, the hieroglyphic spe-
cialist. An archaeologist team discovers a submerged pyramid in
the Arctic, where they happen upon an ancient sacrificial ritual
involving Predators killing Aliens. By interpreting the hieroglyph-
ics, the team ascertains that they have been bated in order to be
body host to the new Aliens for the Predators to hunt. They must
not only escape with their lives, but they must also attempt to
keep the Aliens from escaping. Alexa and a Predator, Scar, are
the only survivors, with Alexa sinking the Alien Queen into the
ocean. A Predator ship returns to retrieve their comrade as well as
reward Alexa with a Predator spear, acknowledging her warrior
abilities. However, on board the Predator ship, Scar harbors an
Alien chestburster.

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 The Believers (1987) is a horror film based on Nicholas Cone’s novel
The Religion, and is directed by John Schlesinger and written by
Mark Frost. It stars Martin Sheen as Cal Jamison and Helen
Shaver as Jessica Halliday. Cal is a recent widower and single
father who moves to New York City to be a police psychologist.
He treats Tom Lopez, who was undercover, trying to gather intel-
ligence about a cult. Tom’s babblings begin to make sense as ritu-
alistic child sacrifices occur around the city by a group practicing
a form of brujería. The group may also have more exclusive mem-
bership, including powerful New York elite. The case becomes even
more personal for Cal when the cult targets his son.

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Sethe’s home in Cincinnati

is haunted by the revenant of her dead daughter, unnamed but
known as Beloved, and the lingering violent consequences of slavery.
Set after the Civil War, Beloved reveals how racism and the slave
industry haunt all the characters, affecting Sethe’s remaining chil-
dren as well as the entire community. While Beloved forces most
to flee the house—Sethe’s other children and Paul D.—Sethe
tries to appease Beloved out of guilt because Sethe believes that
Beloved is the two-year-old daughter she killed. Sethe tried to
escape her cruel white master but was nearly caught; she killed
Beloved to keep her from being retaken by the plantation owner,
believing death to be preferable to slavery. The attention causes
Beloved to become more powerful and more ravenous. The women
in the community help exorcise Beloved from Sethe’s home, and
Sethe comes to terms with her history.

Black Orpheus (1959) is a fantasy film based on the play Orfeu da

Conceição by Vinicius de Moraes and is directed by Marcel Camus
and written by Marcel Camus and Jacques Viot. It stars Breno
Mellow as Orfeo and Marpessa Dawn as Eurydice. The film is
a re-visioning of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set in Rio de
Janeiro. Eurydice is running from Death incarnate, and Orfeu is
running from a lackluster engagement—and both end up run-
ning into each other’s arms during Carnaval. Eurydice is tragically

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 killed, and Orfeu descends into the basement under the Office of
Missing Persons looking for her, where he witnesses a Macumba
ritual. Eurydice speaks to him through an old woman, but as in
the Greek myth, he gazes on her and her spirits leave forever. He
retrieves her body from the morgue and carries her home, but he is
killed by his jealous fiancée. Several children pick up his guitar and
play it, believing that his guitar causes the sun to rise.

Blacula (1972) is a comedy horror Blaxploitation film directed by

William Crain and written by Joan Torres and Raymond Koenig.
It stars William Marshall as Blacula/Mamuwalde and Vonetta
McGee as Luva. Mamuwalde is an African prince of the Abani
nation who seeks Dracula’s help in quelling the slave trade. Dracula
refuses and turns Mamuwalde into a vampire, naming him Blacula
and locking him in a coffin. That was in 1780. In 1972, interior dec-
orators purchase the coffin and have it shipped to Los Angeles.
Blacula arrives and is released, killing and turning people and
being pursued by a police department pathologist. Blacula finds
Luva, whom he believes is the reincarnated version of wife, and he
turns her to save her life; however, Luva is killed. Desperate with
grief, Blacula stands in the sunlight, committing vampire suicide.

Tite Kubo’s Bleach (2001–) is a manga series that centers on Ichigo

Kurosaki, a high schooler who was incidentally given Soul Reaper
powers. The series chronicles his capers as a Soul Reaper, a soldier
who escorts souls to the Soul Society after they depart from this
world and battles Hollows, which are malevolent lost souls who
threaten both humans and other souls. Yoruichi Shihōin is a for-
mer Shinigami captain in one of the Soul Society’s highest-ranking
noble families. She can transform into a cat at will, and she is
renowned for her flash step ability, a high speed movement in
combat.

Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix (2015) is the prequel to Who

Fears Death (2011). Phoenix is an “accelerated woman,” a genetic
experiment confined to Tower 7 in New York run by LifeGen,

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 also known as Big Eye. She is only two years old but possesses
the mind and body of a mature woman; however, she maintains
a childlike innocence, that is, until her Saeed, a fellow “speciMen”
and lover, kills himself because he witnesses something deeply dis-
turbing in a forbidden part of the lab. Phoenix then must grow
up, escaping and demolishing Tower 7. After her awakening, she
journeys through time and space, witnessing the cruel machinery
of Western colonialism at work and redressing those wrongs by
destroying Big Eye facilities.

John Sayles’s The Brother from Another Planet (1984) is a sci-

ence fiction comedy film written and directed by John Sayles. It
stars Joe Morton as The Brother and Daryl Edwards as Fly. The
Brother, a mute black man from Another Planet, escapes his slave
masters, seeking refuge in Harlem, Earth. Pursued by two white
men in black who want to capture and return him to Another
Planet, The Brother must evade them with his telekinetic powers.
The comedy is stifled by intrusions of cruel realities, including
The Brother’s ability to sense the presence of past immigrants
and their plights, as well as when The Brother stumbles upon the
Harlem drug scene.

Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) is set in Brooklyn

in the 1930s and focuses on the coming-of-age narrative of Selina
Boyce, an immigrant from Barbados whose family is trying to
“make it” in America despite battling racism and poverty. Selina’s
mother, Silla, and father, Deighton, have oppositional personal-
ities, with Silla being overly critical and Deighton being blithe
and less fixated on getting a house (status symbol) than is his wife.
Selina must navigate family drama, puberty, and racial tensions
through the Great Depression and World War II, discovering her
own sense of self and values.

In Nalo Hopkin’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), economic col-

lapse has the left the world in ruins and given rise to new localized
orders. Inner city Toronto is run by Rudy Sheldon and his crew,

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 performing favors for the city officials who have fled to the sub-
urbs. The Premier Uttley of Ontario requires a heart transplant and
charges Rudy with finding her a suitable donor. Meanwhile, on the
city’s outskirts, Ti-Jeanne cares for her newborn son and lives with
her grandmother, Gros-Jeanne, an ancestral healer of the Obeah
tradition. Tony, the father of Ti-Jeanne’s child, shows up at Gros-
Jeanne’s home, asking for sanctuary, but in actuality he has been
sent by Rudy to harvest Gros-Jeanne’s heart. Rudy, who is revealed
to be Gros-Jeanne’s bitter ex-husband, summons a Duppy spirit to
finish off Ti-Jeanne. Ti-Jeanne must use her grandmother’s spir-
itual training to confront Rudy and make him pay for killing her
grandmother. Premier Uttley has a change of heart, literally and
figuratively, after receiving Gros-Jeanne’s heart, vowing to make
Toronto a better place for all, not just the elite.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) is a television series created

by Joss Whedon and stars Sara Michelle Gellar as Buffy; Anthony
Stewart Head as Rupert Giles, the Watcher; David Boreanaz as
Angel, Buffy’s vampire lover; and Nicholas Brendon as Xander
Harris, Alyson Hannigan as Willow Rosenberg, and Charisma
Carpenter as Cordelia Chase, Buffy’s friends and helpers collec-
tively known as the “Scooby Gang.” The seven seasons follow Buffy;
her guide and trainer, Giles; and the “Scooby Gang” through high
school and college as they repeatedly save the town of Sunnydale,
and occasionally the world, from all manner of vampires, demons,
and miscellaneous dark forces.

Chloe, Love Is Calling You (1934) is a pre-Code film directed and

written by Marshall Neilan. It stars Olive Borden as Chloe and
Reed Howes as Wade, Chloe’s husband. Set in the South, the film
features Chloe, a woman of supposedly mixed heritage, who lives
with Mandy, her mammy. Chloe is ashamed of her mixed-race
status and rejoices when she discovers that she is actually the long
lost daughter of a white plantation owner, Colonel Gordon, who
Mandy kidnapped because she believed the colonel was respon-
sible for lynching her husband. Chloe is reunited with her father,

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 but Mandy steals Chloe away again, this time to sacrifice her in a
voodoo ritual. Wade, a white man, and Jim, a mixed-race man, save
Chloe; but Jim dies saving Wade’s life (and Chloe preferred Wade
to Jim anyway because he was white).

Chesya Burke’s “Chocolate Park” is a story in her collection of

short stories, Let’s Play White (2004).

Cleopatra Jones (1973) is a Blaxploitation action crime thriller film

directed by Jack Starrett and written by Max Julien and Sheldon
Keller. It stars Tamara Dobson as Cleopatra in the title role; Bernie
Casey as Reuben, Cleopatra’s lover and operator of a halfway house
for addicts; and Shelley Winters as Mommy, a drug lord. Cleopatra
drives a ’73 Corvette Stingray fully equipped with weapons and has
mad martial arts skills. She fronts as a model, but she is actually an
undercover special agent for the U.S. government. After burning a
Turkish poppy field belonging to Mommy, Cleopatra must return
home to Los Angeles to save her boyfriend’s halfway house and
her own neighborhood from Mommy’s fury.

Alice Walker’s magnum opus The Color Purple (1982) is epistolary

format with the protagonist, Celie, a poor adolescent in Georgia,
writing to God because she is traumatized. Her step-father,
Alphonso, physically and sexually abuses her, resulting in two
pregnancies. He takes away her children and marries her off to
malcontent widower, Mister, who needs someone to look after
his children. Celie raises his children and helps her sister escape
Alphonso, eventually also caring for Mister’s mistress, Shug Avery,
a jazz singer with whom Celie falls in love. Shug helps Celie
recover her sister’s letters, discovering that Nettie is living with a
missionary couple who adopted Celie’s two children. Celie musters
up the courage to leave Mister and settle in Tennessee, working as
a seamstress. Although Mister undergoes a change of heart, Celie
refuses to reunite with him. When Alphonso dies, Celie inherits
her home and moves back. Nettie, Celie’s children, Shug, and a few
other characters join her there.

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 W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” (1920) is a science fiction short
story originally published in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil.
A comet hits Earth, releasing poisonous fumes and seemingly kill-
ing everyone except for a black man named Jim Davis and a white,
wealthy woman named Julia. Jim and Julia are able to travel around
New York City together without suspicion or threat, and they nearly
have a tryst when Julia’s father and a gang of white men show up
interrupting them. Julia leaves Jim to join the white men, and the
white men debate whether to lynch him or not, but concede since
Jim saved Julia. A black woman, presumably his wife, runs into Jim’s
arms at the end of the story with her dead child in her arms.

Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899) is a collec-

tion of seven short pieces of fiction with the overarching frame of
being narrated by Uncle Julius McAdoo to a white couple, John
and Annie, who are thinking about buying and moving to an old
plantation in the South. The stories are a variety of tales about
unpleasant southern realities that the black characters face. Many
are folk tales with Afrocentric supernatural elements, including
Hoodoo. Uncle Julius’s renditions of these stories contrast with
John’s romanticized ideas of the South.

Dean Koontz’s novel Darkfall (1984), also known as Darkness

Comes, follows Detective Jack Dawson as he mourns for the loss of
his wife, cares for his two children, and attempts to solve a string
of brutal murders. His partner, Rebecca, believes that the muti-
lated corpses are victims of mafia violence, but Jack believes the
deaths are supernatural in nature due to the fact that the bodies are
maimed as if by a vicious animal but are not eaten. He discovers
that a bocor summoned the beings that are killing people. Jack
also discovers their origin: a pit from hell in a shed, which grows
as time passes, allowing larger demons to pass through. Jack may
have to sacrifice himself in order to close the pit.

Dawn of the Dead (2004) is an action/adventure horror film directed

by Zack Snyder and written by George A. Romero and James

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 Gunn. It stars Sarah Polley as Ana, a nurse, and Ving Rhames as
Kenneth, a police sergeant. The film focuses on a group of random
survivors who convene and fortify a mall during a zombie apoca-
lypse. They must keep the zombies out, but they must also with-
stand the drama and turmoil within their confined group. As the
group’s numbers and supplies dwindle, they decide to make a run
for it, escaping to where a member’s boat is docked. Many perish
along the way, and the few who make it to the boat and later the
island on Lake Michigan are confronted with hordes of zombies.
Their fate is left ambiguous.

Def by Temptation (1990) is a horror film written and directed

by James Bond III. It also stars James Bond III as Joel, Kadeem
Hardison as K, Cynthia Bond as the Seductress, and Bill Nunn
as Dougy. Joel is having a crisis of faith and seeks advice from K,
his friend in New York. They go barhopping, and Joel falls for an
attractive woman, who is actually a succubus. Dougy and K must
discover what the temptress is and how to kill her before their
friend Joel succumbs to her deadly charms.

Octavia Butler’s “The Evening and the Morning and the Night”
is a novella originally published in Omni (1987). Cancer has been
cured; however, the descendants of those who were cured develop
Duryea-Gode Disease (DGD), a genetic ailment that induces
violence and extreme mental disorders. Through strict diet, the
bearers of the disease can delay symptoms, but due to the social
alienation that the disease incurs and the impending doom, many
ponder if life as a DGD carrier is worth living. Lynn is one of the
youth who suffers from DGD and must endure its social stigma.
She is marked by the food she eats as well as by an emblem she
must wear. Lynn must balance her personal freedom with the good
of the community and continually decide between autonomy or
government mandates.

Zora Neale Huston’s Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales

from the Gulf States (1929) is part anthropological project and part

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 oral history manuscript. Hurston collected stories from African
Americans in the Deep South in 1927, recording what she cat-
egorized as “God Tales,” “Preacher Tales,” “Devil Tales,” “Witch
and Hant Tales,” “Heaven Tales,” “John and Massa Tales,” “Neatest
Trick Tales,” “Mistaken Identity Tales,” “Fool Tales,” “Woman
Tales,” “School Tales,” “Miscellaneous Tales,” “Talking Animal
Tales,” and “Animal Tales.” These “confessions” stand as testament
to the rich oral tradition of African Americans maintained in the
South.

Evil Dead (2013) is the fourth horror film in the Evil Dead fran-
chise directed by Fede Alvarez and written by Fede Alvarez,
Rodo Sayagues, and Sam Raimi. It stars Jane Levy as Mia, Shiloh
Fernandez as David, Lou Taylor Pucci as Eric, and Jessica Lucas
as Olivia. A group of friends stay in remote cabin in the woods
to support Mia as she attempts to fight heroin withdrawals. They
find a book in the cellar, and Eric reads a passage, summoning
an evil entity that possesses Mia. Mia tries to flee the cabin, but
the others think her outburst is related to her drug addiction and
stop her. Her possession worsens, and the group discovers from
the book that she is under the influence of the Taker of Souls, who
requires five souls in order to release the Abomination. After five
members of the group are killed and Mia is left alone, she kills the
Abomination with a chainsaw.

Extant (2014–2015) is a science fiction television drama created by

Mickey Fisher and starring Halle Berry as Molly, Pierce Gagnon
as Ethan, and Grace Gummer as Julie Gelineau. Molly is an
astronaut who has spent thirteen months in space, only to return
to Earth and discover she is pregnant, despite previously being
infertile and on a solo mission. Her search for answers regarding
“The Offspring” turns up disturbing and disorienting information,
beginning with the fact that she was its host, not its mother.

“A Fool for Love” is episode seven in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer
television series (1997–2003), season five. It originally aired on

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 November 4, 2000, and features guest actors David Boreanaz
as Angelus, Julie Benz as Darla, Juliet Landau as Drusilla, and
Kali Rocha as Cecily Addams. Angelus, Darla, and Drusilla are
a dynasty of vampire who sired Spike. Cecily was Spike’s human
love interest in 1880 London who spurned him because of his lowly
status. This episode recounts Spike’s origin story as he explains to a
morally and physically injured Buffy how Slayers have been killed
in the past, or at least how he managed to kill two. Spike’s two
Slayer kills include a Chinese Slayer during the Boxer Rebellion
in 1900 and Nikki Wood, a black woman Slayer, on a New York
City subway in 1977. The information he provides upsets Buffy,
who spurns him in much the same manner that Cecily did, which
sends Spike into a vengeful rage. He recants and comforts Buffy
when he finds her crying at her home because she has received bad
news about her injuries and is coming to terms with her mortality.

Formation (2016) is a Beyoncé music video directed by Melina

Matsoukas. Written by Khalif Brown, Jordan Frost, Asheton
Hogan, Mike Will Made It, and Beyoncé, the song was released
on February 16, 2016. The lyrics and images in the music video cel-
ebrate the formation of Beyoncé’s black feminine identity as well
as the formation of black femininity and black cultural identity
as a whole, with references to southern heritage, Katrina, and the
Black Lives Matter movement.

Freddy vs. Jason (2003) is a crossover horror film, combining the

Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street franchises, directed
by Ronny Yu and written by Wes Craven, Victor Miller, Damian
Shannon, and Mark Swift. It stars Robert Englund as Freddy, Ken
Kirzinger as Jason, Monica Keena as Lori, Jason Ritter as Will,
and Kelly Rowland as Kia. The teenagers of Springwood have for-
gotten about Freddy, causing him to lose his ability to terrorize
them in their dreams. Freddy enlists Jason’s aid, having him kill
residents in their sleep and causing people to assume Freddy is
back. However, Jason begins to off potential victims for Freddy;

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 thus, Freddy pulls Jason into his dream realm and battles him, hav-
ing a decided advantage over the hockey-masked serial killer there.
The teenagers realize what is going on and decide to help trick
Freddy into their waking reality, hoping that Jason can finish him.
Both killers appear to die, but at the end of the film, Jason emerges
from the lake holding Freddy’s winking decapitated head.

Foxy Brown (1974) is a Blaxploitation action crime thriller film

written and directed by Jack Hill and starring Pam Grier in the
title role as the vengeful and voluptuous woman tracking down her
boyfriend’s killers; Antonio Fargas as Link Brown, Foxy’s treach-
erous brother; and Peter Brown as Steve Elias, the manager of
a modeling agency linked to Foxy’s boyfriend’s death. Foxy goes
undercover as a prostitute to discover who murdered her govern-
ment agent boyfriend who was investigating drug dealers. She is
caught and sent to a drug-manufacturing plant to be used as a
sex-slave. After escaping, she organizes a grassroots squad to stop
a drug deal and deliver Steve’s genitals to his girlfriend, Kathryn,
who had Foxy sent to a farm to be sexually assaulted.

“Ganger Ball Lightning” is from Nalo Hopkinson’s collection of

short fiction, Skin Folk (2001). A couple uses skin suits to experi-
ence what the other feels when they make love; however, they fail
to adhere to the product’s imperative directions.

Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1990) begins in 1850s Louisiana

but spans over 200 years in episodic time jumps. The protagonist,
a lesbian and an escaped slave, finds refuge in a New Orleans
brothel, where she is turned into a vampire by the Madame, the
elder Gilda. After the elder Gilda opts for a true death, the pro-
tagonist becomes the current reigning Gilda. As an eternal being
and as an intersectionally marginalized being (female, black, queer,
vampire), her narrative explores personal and social issues within
the context of extended time as well as reimagines the European
vampire in an African framework.

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 Angela Toussaint returns to her family home in Tananarive
Due’s The Good House (2003) in Sacajawea, Washington, to put it
on the market and rid herself of the unpleasant memories. The
house has been in her family for four generations and is the place
where her grandmére Marie performed her healing vodou rituals.
But the Good House’s reputation suffered after several unfortu-
nate incidences, including Angela’s mother committing suicide
and Angela’s son accidentally shooting himself with his father’s
gun. Angela also discovers that Marie’s gifts were used in an act of
vengeance, evoking an antagonistic spirit that has spread from the
house to the surrounding community and her estranged husband,
Tariq. Angela must contend with the house and all it embodies.

“Greedy Choke Puppy” is from Nalo Hopkinson’s collection of

short fiction, Skin Folk (2001). A grandmother recalls tales of sou-
couyants, but her granddaughter, who is now an educated woman,
is not interested in such yarns anymore.

“A Habit of Waste” is from Nalo Hopkinson’s collection of short

fiction, Skin Folk (2001). Cynthia spies a woman with her original
body on a streetcar. The woman flaunts her black body and curves
confidently, but when Cynthia inhabited the body, she hid them
in shame. Cynthia then begins to criticize her current white body
model.

Halloween (1978) is a slasher horror film directed by John Carpenter

and written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill, starring Donald
Pleasence as Dr. Sam Loomis, Michael Myers’s psychiatrist, and
debuting Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, Michael Myers’s
prime target. The film is the first installment of the Halloween
franchise, explaining the origins of Michael Myers, who stalks
and terrorizes characters with his iconic butcher knife and white
mask. The film begins with six-year-old Michael stabbing his sister
to death on Halloween night in 1963; it then jumps fifteen years
later when he escapes on Halloween and returns to his hometown

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 of Haddonfield, Illinois, where he embarks on a killing spree with
Dr. Loomis in pursuit and Laurie just a few steps ahead. Laurie
and Dr. Loomis both injure Michael, but his body is not found;
hence, the nine sequels to date.

Hannibal (2013–2015) is a psychological thriller/crime drama horror

television series spinoff of the Dr. Hannibal Lector book and film
franchise created by Bryan Fuller and based on the characters by
Thomas Harris. It stars Hugh Dancy as Will, Mads Mikkelsen as
Hannibal, and Gina Torres as Bella Crawford. Will is an FBI pro-
filer who has a gift for getting into the minds of psychopaths, but
his gift takes a heavy toll on his mental and emotional well-being.
Hannibal is a renowned psychiatrist solicited to mentor Will. The
series explores their relationship, particularly Hannibal’s attempts
to turn Will into cannibalistic serial killer like himself.

Memphis Minnie’s “Hoodoo Lady”:

Hoodoo lady, how do you do?

They tell me you take a boot and turn it to a brand new shoe
But don’t put that thing on me
Don’t put that thing on me
Don’t put that thing on me
’Cause I’m going back to Tennessee

Hoodoo lady, you can turn water to wine

I been wondering where have you been all this time
I’m setting here, broke, and I ain’t got a dime
You ought to put something in these dukes of mine
But don’t put that thing on me
Don’t put that thing on me
Don’t put that thing on me
’Cause I’m going back to Tennessee

(spoken: Boy, you better watch it ’cause she’s tricky.)

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 Hoodoo lady, I want you to unlock my door
So I can get in and get all my clothes
But don’t put that thing on me
Don’t put that thing on me
Don’t put that thing on me
’Cause I’m going back to Tennessee

Now look-a here, Hoodoo lady, I want you to treat me right

Bring my man back home but don’t let him stay all night
And don’t put that thing on me
Don’t put that thing on me
Don’t put that thing on me
’Cause I’m going back to Tennessee

(spoken: Boy, she’s tricky as she can be. Better watch her, too.)

Why look-a here, Hoodoo lady, I’m your friend

When you leave this time, come back again
But don’t put that thing on me
Don’t put that thing on me
Don’t put that thing on me
’Cause I’m going back to Tennessee

(spoken: Boys, I’m scared of her.)

N. K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010) is the first

entry of her fantasy Kingdom trilogy. Kingdoms revolves around
its protagonist, Yeine Darr, a tribal chieftain eventually thrust into
the dangerous politics of castle intrigue as she is invited to live in
the city of Sky ruled by her grandfather, the King. Yeine finds her-
self a pawn between the power struggles between her royal family
members and the pertinacious gods they have enslaved. Yeine must
navigate family politics, especially after Dekarta declares Yeine the
heir to his kingdom; however, she comes to realize that she is being
groomed as a sacrifice to the Skyfather by Dekarta to ensure his
rule and as a sacrifice to reincarnate as the goddess Enefa. Yeine

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 also must process the ideas that she was born to be this sacrifice,
which will enable Enefa to restore balance to the universe and
remove the chains of bondage from the gods, ensuring the king-
dom’s survival.

Stephen King’s It (1987) is set in two different time periods, 1957–

1958 and 1984–1985, in Derry, Maine. A group of misfit kids who
call themselves the “Loser Club” encounter a malicious entity that
can take the form of one’s worst fears; however, it normally man-
ifests as a clown named Pennywise that stalks the town’s sewers.
After suffering casualties, Loser Club defeats It, and vows to
gather again and fight It if It returns. Twenty-seven years later,
most of the group is abroad living their lives, when a string of hei-
nous child-murders occurs in Derry. They reconvene to deal with
their traumatic childhood memories, discovering that It arises
every twenty-seven years to feed before going back into hiberna-
tion. They eventually destroy It, just as a storm destroys Derry, in
essence, freeing the characters from the past.

I Walked with a Zombie (1943) is a horror film directed by Jacques

Tourneur and written by Curt Siodmak, Ardel Wray, and Inez
Wallace. It stars James Ellison as Wesley Rand, Paul’s half-brother
and employee; Frances Dee as Betsy Connell, a nurse hired to
care for Paul’s wife; and Tom Conway as Paul Holland, a Saint
Sebastian sugar plantation owner. Complicated family dynam-
ics plague the plantation: Wesley and Jessica, Paul’s wife, are in
love, and Betsy and Paul are attracted to each other. Jessica suffers
from an unknown illness, and Betsy takes her to see the local
voodoo practitioners, only to discover that the voodoo priest is
Mrs. Rand, Wesley and Paul’s mother. The locals suspect Jessica
of being a zombie, and Mrs. Rand later admits to Betsy that she
was possessed and put a curse on Jessica to keep Jessica from run-
ning away with Wesley and causing strife in the family. Under
the influence of the Sabreur, Wesley stabs Jessica, then carries her
into the sea where he drowns. Paul and Betsy are left to comfort
each other.

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 The title character in Jonathan Mayberry’s Joe Ledger series
(2009–) is an Army Ranger veteran and detective based in
Baltimore. Hired by the Department of Military Sciences (DMS),
Joe’s job is to pursue and eliminate advanced bio-terrorists’ threats,
which can take the form of deadly pathogens used to generate
zombie flu or genocide or both. Joe encounters alien conspira-
cies, secret societies bent on ethnic cleansing or profit (such as the
Seven Kings), as well as vampire assassins known as the Red Order
as he and his fellow DMS members attempt to keep the world
from descending into plague and chaos.

King of the Zombies (1941) is a comedy horror film directed by Jean

Yarbrough and written by Lindsley Parsons. It stars Dick Purcell
as Mac, Joan Woodbury as Barbara, and Mantan Moreland as
the pilot’s superstitious manservant, Jeff. A plane crashes on a
Caribbean island, and a German doctor invites the passengers to
stay in his mansion. Jeff tries to convince the other passengers that
the doctor is harboring more than human guests in the doctor’s
abode. The passengers eventually discover the doctor is a spy over-
seeing a voodoo ritual and seeking intelligence on zombies that he
can use as military weaponry.

Lemonade (2016) is Beyoncé’s sixth studio album as well as the

title of the one-hour HBO visual album directed by Beyoncé,
Dikayl Rimmasch, and Jonas Åkerlund. Tidal, the streaming ser-
vice co-owned by Beyoncé, describes the project as “every wom-
an’s journey of self-knowledge and healing.” The film is divided
into segments (Intuition, Denial, Anger, Apathy, Emptiness,
Accountability, Reformation, Forgiveness, Resurrection, Hope,
and Redemption), and it is interspersed with poetry by Warsan
Shire. Lemonade’s lyrics and images address the personal as well
as the political and the territory that spans between and connects
the two.

Erna Brodber’s Louisiana (1994) explores creole culture in both

Louisianas—the state and the Jamaican parish—through the

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 character of Ella Townsend, an African American anthropologist
with Caribbean heritage researching Louisiana folk life. During
her project, she discovers connections between previously parti-
tioned places, like life and death, magic and religion, and the mysti-
cal and reality. Ella is particularly made aware of these correlations
when her main research subject dies but continues to contact her
after death through Ella’s tape recorder. Ella learns about herself as
well as the rich and fluid beliefs and practices of magico-religions.

Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) is set in Willow Springs off the
South Carolina and Georgia coasts. It is a community of eman-
cipated slave descendants who have lived there for generations.
Mama Day is the community’s healer and a direct descendant
of the community’s founder, Saphira Wade. Mama Day’s niece,
Cocoa, is next in line and resembles Mama Day’s headstrong per-
sonality. However, Cocoa is hexed by a jealous wife, and Mama
Day must save her, but Cocoa’s husband, a modern, Westernized
man, must grapple with Mama Day’s ancient ways and the com-
munity’s decidedly unique culture in order to aid his wife.

Christopher Farnsworth’s Nathaniel Cade series (2010–) fea-

tures three novels and a novella: Blood Oath (2010), The President’s
Vampire (2011), Red, White, and Blood (2012), and The Burning Men
(2014). The series centers on Nathaniel Cade, a vampire who has
been bound by a voodoo blood oath to serve and protect the pres-
ident of the United States since Andrew Jackson. Cade and Zach
Barrows, Cade’s official White House handler, tackle cases that are
“above top secret,” saving the country and the world from the real
monsters that inspired the myths.

Night of the Living Dead (1968) is an independent horror film

directed by George A. Romero and written by John A. Russo and
George A. Romero. It stars Duane Jones as Ben and Judith O’Dea
as Barbra. The film is set in rural Pennsylvania, where Barbra and
her brother, Johnny, go to visit their father’s grave. They are attacked
by a strange, menacing man, and Johnny is killed. Barbra flees to a

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 farmhouse, where Ben appears and fends off the onslaught of shuf-
fling corpses, saving Barbra and locking them in the farmhouse
with others seeking refuge. After an attempt to escape fails and the
animated corpses break into the house, Ben, the only remaining
survivor, locks himself in the cellar. The next morning, a makeshift
militia kills Ben, assuming he is one of the activated dead.

Nosferatu (1922) is a horror film based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula

directed by F. W. Murnau and written by Henrik Galeen. It stars
Max Schreck as Count Orlok, Gustav von Wangenheim as Thomas
Hutter, and Greta Schroder as Ellen. The storyline parallels Dracula,
with Thomas traveling to Transylvania to broker a real-estate deal
with Count Orlok, and Count Orlok becoming enamored with
Thomas’s fiancée, Ellen. The Count arrives in England, after killing
everyone on board the ship, and strange deaths begin occurring in
the town he ports. The end slightly departs from Dracula’s tem-
plate, with Ellen sacrificing herself to kill the nosferatu.

Ouanga (1936) is a horror film written and directed by George

Terwilliger and stars Fredi Washington as Clelie, the black Haitian
plantation owner; Philip Brandon as Adam, the white neighboring
plantation owner; and Marie Paxton as Eve, Adam’s fiancé. Adams
spurns Clelie because she “belongs with her kind.” Thus, Clelie
attempts to put a curse, a ouanga (pronounced “wanga”), on Eve.
When that does not work as expected, Clelie raises two zombies
and has them kidnap Eve, whom she plans on sacrificing in a voo-
doo ritual. Lestrange, a black man, saves Eve and kills Clelie.

Prom Night (1980) is a slasher horror film based on a story by Robert

Guza Jr., directed by Paul Lynch, and written by William Gray.
It stars Leslie Nielsen as Mr. Hammond, the high school princi-
pal and Robin’s father, and Jamie Lee Curtis as Kim Hammond,
Robin’s sister. It is 1980, the night of the prom, and the sixth anni-
versary of Robin Hammond’s mysterious death, which was blamed
on a local sexual predator. Four teenagers—Wendy, Jude, Kelly,
and Nick—receive strange phone calls as they prepare for prom,

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 and that night at the dance, a masked stranger picks the four teen-
agers off one by one. To save Nick (her date), Kim strikes the fatal
blow, only to realize that the masked killer is her brother, Alex,
who was also Robin’s twin. Alex explains that the four teenagers
were responsible for Robin’s death before dying in Kim’s arms.

Kiini Ibura Salaam’s short story “Rosamojo” is from the anthology

Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003), edited by Nalo Hopkinson.

Return of the Living Dead is a five comedy horror film series

spawned from Night of the Living Dead (1968), but distinct from
George A. Romero’s sequels. The first film in the series is The
Return of the Living Dead (1985) directed by Dan O’Bannon and
written by Rudy Ricci, John A. Russo, Russell Streiner, and Dan
O’Bannon. A Trioxin gas leak at a medical supply warehouse
causes the dead to rise and attack humans to eat their brains.
Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988) is written and directed
by Ken Wiederhorn. A barrel of Trioxin gas leftover from the
first film is discovered by a few kids, who accidentally unleash it,
wreaking havoc on their town. Return of the Living Dead Part III
(1993) is directed by Brian Yuzna and written by John Penney.
A teenager witnesses his father, a colonel in the army use, Trioxin.
When the young man’s girlfriend is killed in a motorcycle acci-
dent, he uses the gas to bring her back to life. Return of the Living
Dead: Necropolis (2005) is directed by Ellory Elkayem and written
by William Butler and Aaron Strongoni. Set ten years after the
previous film, a group of teens jailbreak their friend who is impris-
oned at the lab where scientists are experimenting with Trioxin
on zombie clones. During the effort to rescue their friends, the
teens also release the zombies. Return of the Living Dead: Rave to
the Grave (2005) is also directed by Ellory Elkayem and written by
William Butler and Aaron Strongoni. Set one year after the previ-
ous film, the characters who were teenagers in Necropolis are now
college students. Trioxin is now in capsule form as a recreational
drug called Z; however, users eventually turn into zombies with
prolonged use or high dosage.

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 Rigamo (2016) is a short film written and directed by Che Grayson
and is based off the comic by Che Grayson and Sharon de la Cruz.
It stars Judianny Compres as Isabelle, Akira Golz as Kera (age
nine), and Chiquita Camille as Caroline. Kera Moore is a young,
female superhero. She can bring the dead back to life with her
tears, but she discovers that this superpower comes at a high price,
costing her years of her own life: every time she brings something
back from the dead, she advances in her own age.

Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1975) is short for Jerusalem’s Lot,

Maine, were the novel is set. Ben Mears returns home to Salem’s
Lot with the intent to write a novel about the town, particularly
about a haunted house there where he saw a ghost as a child. Other
mysterious characters take up residence—namely, Richard Straker
and Barlow, who purchase the haunted house and Laundromat,
converting it into an antique shop. People begin to go missing,
and Ben and a small group of other townspeople deduce that the
denizens of Salem’s Lot are being turned into vampires. Ben and
his band of renegades kill Barlow, the master vampire, but suffer
casualties until only Ben and Mark remain. Ben and Mark flee
to Mexico but return a year later during the day to set fire to the
town.

Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads (2003) interweaves three differ-

ent narratives: that of Mer, a Haitian sugar plantation slave; Jeanne
Duval, mistress of poet Charles Baudelaire in France; and Meritet,
a Nubian prostitute turned St. Mary of Egypt. All three narratives
and characters are guided and united by Lasirén, a fertility goddess
who moves through time and space, offering her assistance to these
three women as they seek freedom and autonomy. Lasirén aids
Mer during the Haitian Revolution, helping her obtain a differ-
ent type of freedom—one of preserved legacy. Lasirén then assists
Jeanne in finding economic liberty and contentment, and finally,
she helps Meritet transcend her circumstances and surroundings,
freeing her mind, as she wanders the desert in communion with
the goddess.

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 Scream Blacula Scream (1973) is the sequel to Blacula and is directed
by Bob Kelljan and written by Joan Torres, Raymond Koenig, and
Maurice Jules. William Marshall reprises his role as Blacula and is
joined by Pam Grier as Lisa, a voodoo queen apprentice. Blacula
is brought back into being by Willis, the disinherited son of a
Voodoo queen. Blacula turns Willis as well as others into vam-
pires and seeks Lisa’s help, wishing to be cured of vampirism. As
she performs the ritual, police search for the person responsible
for recent murders. Blacula brutally kills one of the officers, and
Lisa stabs the voodoo dolls made in his image, abolishing Blacula
forever.

Scream 2 (1997) is a slasher horror film directed by Wes Craven,

written by Kevin Williamson, and stars David Arquette, Neve
Campbell, Courteney Cox, and Sarah Michelle Gellar. The film
is set two years after the events of the first Scream and involves a
copycat Ghostface serial killer taking out a group of college stu-
dents who have the same names as the original victims. Several of
the survivors from the Woodsboro murders help the police try to
discover that the killers are, once again, a pair of psychopaths, one
vying for fame, the other for revenge.

The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) is directed by Wes Craven and
written by Wade Davis, Richard Maxwell, and Adam Rodman. It
is based on Wade Davis’s nonfiction account of his investigation
into a zombie claim in Haiti and stars Bill Pullman as Dennis Alan,
Cathy Tyson as Marielle Duchamp, and Zakes Mokae as Dargent
Peytraud. Dennis is commissioned by a pharmaceutical company
to find the drug used in Voodoo rituals to create zombies, believing
that it has potential as an anesthetic. He searches in Haiti during a
revolution, and is captured several times and tortured by the com-
mander of the Tonton Macoute, Captain Dargent Petraud. A local
witch doctor named Mozart sneaks Alan the drug, but back in the
states, Alan is visited by Petraud’s spirit, predicting his death. Thus,
Alan returns to Haiti, where his allies are sacrificed for Petraud’s
political and personal power. Alan is dusted with zombie power

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 and buried alive. Alan eventually escapes his coffin and defeats
Petraud with the help of Alan’s jaguar spirit animal at the same
time that Jean-Claude Duvalier is removed from power.

Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) records Jack Torrance’s descent

into madness under the supernatural influences of a historic hotel
in the Colorado Rockies. Jack is an author, an alcoholic, a husband,
a father, an off-season hotel caretaker, as well as a person with
anger management issues. His son, Danny, has “the shining,” a
unique psychic ability to see the hotel’s less-than-scenic past, read
minds, and receive premonitions. Danny’s presence in the hotel
extenuates the hauntings, and these malevolent forces eventually
possess Jack. Induced by the hotel’s hostel side, Jack attempts to
kill his wife, Wendy, and Danny. They barely escape as Jack is killed
in a boiler explosion, which also destroys the hotel.

Nalo Hopkinson’s novel Sister Mine (2013) tells the story of two
sisters fathered by a god and a mortal woman who were turned
into a mortal human and a lake monster for their copulation. The
sisters are conjoined in the womb, and separated only after birth.
Abby is magical, but Makeda lacks mojo, which makes her an
outsider in her own family during her childhood. When she is
grown, Makeda decides to move out, away from her sister, in order
to find her purpose and gifts since she is not magically endowed.
Her father goes missing, so she returns home, only in time for
him to die shortly after being found. It is revealed that Makeda
did have mojo, but her uncle discarded it when he separated her
from her sister at birth in order to house her father’s mojo within
her. After departing from her father’s body, her father’s disoriented
spirit indwells a kudzu plant, searching for its lost mojo. Makeda,
with her sister’s help, embarks on a new quest: she must find her
mojo in order to survive the reclaiming of her father’s powers by
his unsettled spirit.

Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk (2001) is a short fiction collection of

fifteen narratives and winner of the 2002 World Fantasy Award for

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 Best Story Collection. The collection draws from Caribbean folk-
lore, including the soucouyant (vampire) and the lagahoo (were-
wolf ). From reworkings of Red Riding Hood to postapocalyptic
settings to science fiction melded with Caribbean points of view,
Skin Folk explores in compressed form various aspects of what it
means to inhabit one’s skin.

Sleepy Hollow (2013–) is a television show based on Washing Irving’s

short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and is created by Alex
Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Phillip Iscove, and Len Wiseman. It stars
Tom Mison as Ichabod Crane, a soldier spy during the American
Revolution who kills the Headless Horseman in 1781, and Nicole
Beharie as Abbi Mills, a police lieutenant in present day. Two hun-
dred and thirty years after Ichabod and the Headless Horseman
kill each other, the Headless Horseman is summoned back to life,
bringing Ichabod with him because their bloods mixed when they
died. The Headless Horseman is one of the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse; thus, Ichabod solicits the aid of Abbie to help him
stop the Headless Horseman’s unholy mission.

Atsushi Ōkubo’s Soul Eaters (2004–2013) is a Japanese manga

series set in the Death Weapon Meister Academy in Death City,
Nevada, where a Shinigami named Death trains humans who can
shapeshift into weapons. These humans are called meisters, and
they must acquire ninety-nine evil human souls and one witch in
order to evolve their weapon into a death scythe, a Shinigami level
weaponry. Mira Naigus is a meister. Her name is similar to the
Japanese word for mummy, and she always appears wrapped in
bandages.

Derrick Bell’s “The Space Traders”(1992) is a science fiction short story

that posits a provocative political debate. Extraterrestrials have made
contact, brokering a trade agreement: they will give the United States
unprecedented technical knowledge, including clean nuclear power,
in exchange for all the black people. U.S. leaders debate the merits
of the barter deal, eventually finding a way to perform rhetorical and

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 policy gymnastics in order to legally make the exchange. The short
story was adapted for an HBO television film in 1994.

The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) is a political satire film based
on the novel by Sam Greenlee, directed by Ivan Dixon, and adapted
to the screen by Sam Greenlee and Melvin Clay. It stars Lawrence
Cook as Dan Freeman. Dan is the token black hire by the CIA in
the 1970s. Unbeknownst to the CIA, Dan is also a black nation-
alist. After he is thoroughly trained in CIA tactics, he resigns,
returns to Chicago, and begins training “Freedom Fighters” with
the intent of making a “new nation” where black people have fairer
opportunities and justice.

Sugar Hill (1974) is an action/adventure horror film directed by

Paul Maslansky and written by Tim Kelly. It stars Marki Bey as
Diana “Sugar,” Zara Cully as Mama Maitresse, Robert Quarry
as Morgan, and Don Pedro Colley as Lord of the Dead Baron
Samedi. Sugar’s boyfriend is murdered by white gangsters, who
are also trying to take over her club. Mama Maitresse uses voodoo
powers to summon Baron Samedi, who, in turn, raises zombies
to stop the white gangsters’ tirade in exchange for Sugar’s soul.

Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973) is set in The Bottom, a black neigh-

borhood in Ohio, where Sula and Nel grow up together, the best
of friends sharing a dark secret. Sula’s family is less conventional,
while Nel’s family is mostly traditional and stable. Nel follows her
mother’s footsteps and settles down after high school, but Sula
takes a ten-year sabbatical from mundane life. She returns in
infamy and has an affair with Nel’s husband. The town consid-
ers her the ultimate form of lewdness, ironically achieving a form
of harmony with Sula’s extreme disregard for convention there to
balance them out. After Sula dies, the town loses its unity and
disintegrates back to its usually petty bickering.

Supernova (2000) is a science fiction horror film directed by Walter

Hill (credited as Thomas Lee) and written by David C. Wilson,

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 William Malone, and Daniel Chuba. It stars James Spader as copi-
lot Nick, Angela Bassett as medical officer Kaela, Robert Forster as
Captain A.J., Lou Diamond Phillips as medical technician Yerzy,
Robin Tunney as paramedic Danika, Wilson Cruz as computer
technician Benjamin, and Peter Facinelli as Kaela’s former abusive
love interest, Karl. The film is set in the twenty-second century and
centers on the Nightingale 229 medical crew. The search and rescue
team answers a distress signal from Titan 37 moon, but encoun-
ters ship damage upon arrival. They still manage to save Karl, who
initially signaled them, and an alien artifact in his possession that
imbues him with strength and youth. Karl kills everyone except
Nick and Kaela, but the surviving couple eventually destroy Karl
and the alien artifact and escape back to Earth; however, the
destruction of the alien artifact and the manner of their escape
have lingering consequences for them and for the future of Earth.

Tales from the Crypt: Demon Night (1995) is a horror film spawned
from the HBO series Tales from the Crypt and is directed by
Ernest R. Dickerson and written by Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris, and
Mark Bishop. It stars John Kassir as the Crypt Keeper (voice), Billy
Zane as the Collector, William Sadler as Frank, and Jada Pinkett
Smith as Jeryline. The Collector pursues Frank, who possesses an
ancient and powerful artifact. Their cars crash, and they end up at
a boardinghouse in rural New Mexico. Police get involved because
both vehicles were stolen, but when the officers try and arrest the
Collector and Frank, the Collector kills one of the officers, then
creates a small demonic army from the sand and his own blood.
Frank uses his artifact to protect the boardinghouse and convinces
the residents that they must wait out the night. The night is spent
battling the Collector’s demonic army and ends with the Collector
killing most of the people and Jeryline killing the Collector. Frank
bestows the artifact to Jeryline before dying, and Jeryline leaves on
a bus with it, pursued by the next Collector.

William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest is about the scheming sor-

cerer Prospero’s attempt to regain his deposed position as Duke of

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 Milan. After being exiled with his daughter, Miranda, to a remote
island, Prospero enslaves Caliban and Ariel to do his bidding. Ariel
is an island sprite who was previously enslaved by Sycorax, the
unseen, powerful Algerian witch and mother of Caliban. A tem-
pest conjured by Prospero causes a ship to wreck, washing several
important persons ashore: Antonio, Prospero’s usurping brother;
King Alonso of Naples, who can restore Prospero to his proper
place; and King Alonso’s son, Ferdinand. Through Prospero’s mag-
ical wiles and the fumbling aid of his minions, Caliban and Ariel,
he reveals Antonio’s treachery, regains his title, and further cements
his station by orchestrating the marriage between Miranda and
Ferdinand.

True Blood (2008–2014) is an HBO television series created by

Alan Ball and based on Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire
Mysteries book series. It stars Anna Paquin as Sookie, a telepathic
waitress who is also part fairy; Stephen Moyer as Bill, a vampire
from the Civil War era; Sam Trammel as Sam, a shapeshifting
bar owner; Ryan Kwanten as Jason, Sookie’s brother; and Rutina
Wesley as Tara, Sookie’s spunky best friend and later vampire. It
is set mostly in a small town in Louisiana, beginning shortly after
the creation of True Blood, a synthetic substitute for blood. True
Blood allows vampires to emerge from hiding and forces soci-
ety to adjust to the revelation that they exist. Each season reveals
more supernatural beings living among humans as well as explores
contemporary issues, such as religion and the power of belief, the
violent consequences of racism and discrimination, human/non-
human rights, as well as others.

Henry James’ novel The Turn of the Screw (1898) is designed to

conjure doubts and disorientation through its unreliable narrator.
In the form of a found manuscript, the narrative is told from
the perspective of a governess who has been hired by a wealthy
man to manage his wards—his niece, Flora, and nephew, Miles.
He leaves them all at his country estate in Bly, making it clear to
the governess that he does not wish to be bothered with them.

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 Miles is expelled from boarding school for unknown reasons, but
the governess is taken with him, so she does not pressure him into
revealing the cause. She begins seeing a man and woman on the
premise that the rest of the staff does not and believes the chil-
dren see them as well. She surmises that they are the former gov-
erness, Miss Jessel, and another employee, Peter Quint, who had
an affair and died there. The children seem to have an increasing
affinity with the ghosts, and the governess must do everything in
her power to protect them. In a final encounter with Peter Quint’s
ghost, Miles dies in the governess’s arms.

Stephen King’s Under the Dome: A Novel (2009) portrays from

multiple points of view how the residents of Chester Mill, Maine,
react to an encompassing, invisible dome being placed over their
town, isolating them from the outside and acting as a crucible for
small town politics and big egos. The chief of police is killed when
the dome sets, leaving a key position of authority open for the
ambitious Big Jim, a used car salesmen, to take over. A small group
tries to repel Big Jim and his posse, but is forced to seek refuge
on an abandoned farm. During Big Jim and Chef Bushey’s drug
battle, most of the townspeople are incinerated in an explosion.
The few remaining are asphyxiating, when Barbie and Julia, two
members of the resistance, go to an alien device they found that
can communicate with the extraterrestrial owners and operators of
the dome. After desperate pleas, they convince the aliens that they
are sentient beings. The aliens remove the dome, which turns out to
be something similar to an ant farm: solely for entertainment value.

Vamp (1986) is a comedy horror film directed by Richard Wenk and

written by Richard Wenk and Donald P. Borchers. The film stars
Chris Makepeace as Keith, Sandy Baron as Vic, Robert Rusler
as A.J., Dedee Pfeiffer as Allison/Amaretto, Gedde Watanabe
as Duncan, and Grace Jones as Queen Katrina. Three college
students—Keith, A.J. and Duncan—embark on a comedy of errors
in order to get into a fraternity by hiring a stripper to impress their
college peers. Queen Katrina, the exotic dancer they attempt to

Appendix 

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 hire, is entrancing and, as they discover, also a vampire. Escapades
ensue as A.J. is killed and turned and Keith and Duncan befriend a
waitress, Amaretto, who helps them flee the onslaught of vampires
lead by Queen Katrina and Vlad.

The Vampire Diaries (2009–) is a teen romance television series

developed by Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec and based on L. J.
Smith’s The Vampire Diaries book series. It stars Paul Wesley as
Stefan, Ian Somerhalder as Damon, Nina Dobrev as Elena, and
Kat Graham as Bonnie. The teen romance series centers on the
love triangle between Elene, Stefan, and Damon—a human young
woman and two brother vampires. In addition to their romantic
drama, the setting, Mystic Falls, Virginia, has a long supernatural
history that still affects the residents, who are mostly descendants
of the original settlers. Bonnie, Elena’s best friend and a power-
ful witch, dies in season four but returns as a ghost and is later
resurrected.

L. A. Banks’s twelve-book The Vampire Huntress Legend

series (2003–2009) follows the escapades of Damali Richards, a
spoken-word artist for Warriors of Light Records and a Neteru,
a human born once a millennia to battle creatures from the Dark
Realm, mainly vampires. Damali and her Guardian team through-
out the series carry on the struggle between good and evil.

Wake (2010) is a short dramatic horror film written and directed

by Bree Newsome and starring Sahr Ali as Charmaine, Christina
Faison as Florence, and Benton Greene as The Man. Set in the
South during the 1930s, the film depicts a sexually repressed
woman, Charmain, who kills her father in order to be free of his
patriarchal domination. She keeps dirt from her father’s grave and
uses it to conjure a spirit, requesting that the spirit give her the man
of her dreams. The Man arrives on her porch and, at first, seems to
meet all her criteria. However, the honeymoon phase does not last
long. Charmaine finds herself, once again, under the rule of a cruel
manlike entity with which she must contend.

 Appendix

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 The Walking Dead (2003–) is a comic book series written by Robert
Kirkman and artistically rendered by Tony Moore and Charlie
Adiard that has spawned a television series and video games.
The series’ nucleolus narrative follows Deputy Rick Grimes, who
awoke from a coma after the zombie apocalypse occurred. He finds
his wife, son, and other survivors, and together as a community
they must endure the new reality of living among the walking dead.

The Walking Dead (2010–) television series is developed by Frank

Darabont and is based on the comic book series by Robert Kirkman,
Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard. It stars Andrew Lincoln as Rick
Grimes, former deputy; Steven Yeun as Glenn, a former pizza
delivery guy and Maggie’s husband; Norman Reedus as Daryl, a
crossbow-wielding, motorcycle-riding hunter; Melissa McBride
as Carol, an ex-domesticate who is now one of the fiercest char-
acters; Lennie James as Morgan, a bō fighter who still believes
in the potential for good in humanity; Lauren Cohan as Maggie,
Glenn’s girlfriend and the group’s rising diplomatic leader; and
Danai Gurira as Michonne, a pensive and capable katana warrior.
The series follows the group under the (sometimes tentative) lead-
ership of Rick as they try to survive the zombie apocalypse and
establish a stable community amid the walking dead and equally
dangerous living.

White Zombie (1932) is a pre-Code horror film directed by Victor

Halperin and written by Garnett Weston. It is based on William
Seabrook’s The Magic Island and is often considered the first fea-
ture length zombie film. It stars Bela Lugosi as Murder Legendre,
a voodoo master; Madge Bellamy as Madeline Short Parker, the
damsel of interest; and Joseph Cathorn as Dr. Bruner, a missionary.
A wealthy sugar plantation owner, Charles Beaumont, hires
Murder Legendre to turn Madeline into a zombie in order to
make her new husband believe she is dead so Charles can have her
all to himself. Madeline appears to die, but when Neil, her mourn-
ing husband, visits her tomb and finds it empty, he ask Dr. Bruner
to help him discover what happened to her. Dr. Bruner explains

Appendix 

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 that Murder creates zombies that work and guard Charles’s plan-
tation. They go in search of Madeline, and while trying to rescue
her, cause the death of Murder and Charles. Once Murder is dead,
his control over Madeline is relinquished.

Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed (1980) is the fourth book of the

Patternist series but the earlier in terms of chronology. Anyanwu,
a shapeshifting immortal from Africa with the ability to heal the
sick and herself, is befriended by Doro, a bodysnatching immor-
tal from Egypt. Doro has a colony where he practices eugenics,
breeding gifted “seeds” together in order to create superior humans
with whose bodies he can mate as well as snatch. He convinces
Anyanwu to join him in his New World village, where he will
bestow her with immortal children. Once there, he pairs her with
his son Isaac. Power struggles ensue between Anyanwu and Doro
after the death of Isaac and Nweke, Anyanwu and Isaac’s daughter.
She shifts into an animal and flees (because Doro cannot sense
her or kill her when she is in animal form), and she establishes her
own colony in Louisiana. Doro eventually finds her and disrupts
her harmonious community, but he recants once she threatens to
commit suicide. His concession of cruelty and power allows them
to form a partnership.

 Appendix

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 Notes

Preface
. I continue to employ this method in my initial viewings of horror
movies. I remain terrified at the first viewing; it is the second viewing
that gives me power, a sense of control over my emotions along with an
ability to see the construction and seams of the film itself. The advent of
the director’s commentary on DVDs has only aided this process.
. Yes, I was a womanish enough seven-year-old to use the word “heck”
correctly.
. I believe my older cousin Lee had a strange fixation on terrifying me—
as older boy cousins/play brothers are wont to do with their annoying
younger girl cousins/play sisters—and introduced me to the campier
and far scarier Return of the Living Dead (1985–) series before my aunts
rectified the situation by initiating my love for zombies by introducing
me to George Romero, writer and director of Night of the Living Dead
(1968).
. Sanaa Lathan’s character in AVP, Alexa Woods, is the only human
survivor and teams up with the surviving Predator to defeat the Alien
Queen and her minions.
. The infected—the contagious peoples of the apocalypse in 28 Days
Later—are often mistakenly referred to as zombies. I am not so much
of a zombie purist that I can’t identify Boyle’s contemporary reimagining
of the human fear of contagion. His revised zombies are living beings
infected with the dangerous virus named Rage.
. The circumstance of Michonne’s rape remains a controversial story arc
in Robert Kirkman’s comic book series. Michonne and two other (male)



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 members of her group are captured by a rival faction of survivors and
tortured for information on their group’s location and supply status.
. The Vampire Huntress Legend series (2003–2009).

Introduction
. The other genre is comedy.
. Isabel Cristina Piñedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of
Horror Film Viewing (New York: State University of New York Press,
1997), 31.
. Cheryl Wall presents the concept of “worrying the lines” as a framework
for reading African diasporic women’s literature in that it is “inevitably
a trope for repetition with difference. . . . [It] locates black women’s
writing in relation to the multiple literary traditions that inform it. . . .
By rewriting or reading the dominant story, and delegitimating or
displacing that story, black women inscribe their own.” Cheryl W. Wall,
Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 16.
. Piñedo, Recreational Terror, 17.
. Ibid., 18.
. Ibid.
. Ibid., 17.
. Ibid.
. Ibid.
. Art-horror is directly opposed to what Carroll defines as natural horror,
which he believes consists of the horrific actions society commits against
itself, such as slavery, genocide, and war.
. Much of contemporary theory makes this very same mistake. Most
bookstores and other cultural markers refer to the subgenres together
with the shaky use of grammatical slashes to highlight their differences,
such as science fiction/fantasy/horror. I myself have been guilty of this
particular notion, teaching courses with titles such as “Black Women in
Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror.” Wall, Worrying the Line.
. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart
(New York: Routledge, 1990), 27.
. Ibid., 28–29.

 Notes to Pages xiii–5

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 . Robin Wood, “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s,” in Horror,
The Film Reader, ed. Mark Jancovich (New York: Routledge, 2001), 26.
. Dawn of the Dead (2004) is not one of the primary texts in this piece. It
is used as an exemplar of the major barriers to black women in zombie
horror—in particular, the presence and complicated characterizations of
black female characters. Eight years later, Snyder’s remake remains the
highest-grossing zombie film of all time ([Link]).
. See Michael Newbury, “Fast Zombie/Slow Zombie: Food Writing,
Horror Movies, and Agribusiness Apocalypse,” American Literary History
24, no. 1: 87‒114, 89.
. Dawn of the Dead is not the only guilty party here. It proves useful
because it is well known and the most contemporary example of my
critical examinations at the time of writing.
. The trope of the competent black male survivor who often aims to
become a leader of the group emerged in George Romero’s Night of the
Living Dead (1968) with Duane Jones’s Ben. See Adam Lowenstein’s
“Living Dead: Fearful Attractions of Film” (2010), Annalee Newitz’s
Pretend We’re Dead (2006), and Kim Paffenroth’s Gospel of the Living
Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth (2006) for critical analyses
of Ben.
. Snyder’s construction of capable female survivors continues the revision
Romero has sustained with the “representations of active and even
aggressive women” in the rest of his “Dead” series. Stephen Harper,
“‘They’re Us’: Representations of Women in George Romero’s ‘Living
Dead’ Series,” Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media 3 (2003): 1‒12.
. I begin in this century because Shakespeare’s dramas remain an influen-
tial and foundational example of the modern Anglophone literary arts.
. Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing The
‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman,’” in Out of the Kumbla:
Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine
Savory Fido (Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 1994), 114–115.
. Sycorax is Caliban’s mother in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and former
ruler of the island Prospero has colonized. She is never seen or heard
and is remembered by the island’s inhabitants as monstrous in nature.
. bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” The
Feminism and Visual Cultural Reader (2003): 94–105.

Notes to Pages 5–7 

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 . William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene II.
. Wood, “American Nightmare,” 26.
. Carol Clover speaks of this phenomenon as the “majority viewer” of
horror film who is a young male. I extend his identity further to include
that he is also white, heterosexual, and middle-class. See the first chapter
of Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Harry
Benshoff refers to this ideal viewer—though not exactly by that term—
as he expands the definition of queerness to include those audience
members who do not fit that very narrow ideal; see Harry Benshoff,
“Blaxploitation Horror Films: Generic Reappropriation or
Reinscription?” Cinema Journal 39, no. 2 (2000): 32–33.
. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., But Some
of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black
Women’s Studies (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1993), i. I define
text to include films, books, comics, and graphic novels as well as other
mediums, such as painting, sculpture, and movie posters that can be
interrogated by horror criticism. For this work, I focus on both film and
comic book texts.
. The excoriation of Michelle Obama’s presentation as a First Lady as a
wife and mother first, as well as a paragon of the institutional family,
failed to acknowledge that her presentations subvert previous presenta-
tions of black women only as domestic workers. See Brittney
Cooper, “Lay off Michelle Obama: Why White Feminists Need to
Lean Back,” Salon, November 29, 2013. Black womanhood has always
been constructed as “strong” enough to handle men’s work. Enslaved
black women completed the same tasks as enslaved black men, for their
work was not gendered. This aided the successful campaign to masculin-
ize black women. See Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe:
An American Grammar Book,” diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81.
. Carol Boyce-Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the
Subject (New York: Routledge, 1994), 6.
. bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze,” in Black Looks: Race and
Representation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 116.
. Robin R. Means Coleman, Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films
from the 1890s to Present (New York: Routledge, 2013), location 766 of 8596.

 Notes to Pages 8–13

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 . [Link]
[Link].
. Ibid.
. Location 3460 of 8596.
. Ibid.
. This book contains an appendix with a short summary of each of the
creative works analyzed through the text.
. Matt Wray defines stigmatype in the following way: “Stigmatype is
perhaps an odd neologism, but I coined it because stereotype, a tired
word that connotes psychological prejudices and thought patterns,
doesn’t speak well to the social dimensions of cultural differentiation and
because stigmatizing boundary term is too cumbersome and unwieldy.
Stigmatypes speaks both to the classifying impulse—the impulse to
typify—and to the hierarchicalization of categories through
denigration of the other. Analytically, stigmatype is needed for another
reason: stereotypes need not be stigmatizing.” Matt Wray, ed., Not Quite
White (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
. [Link]
horror-writersstorytellers-by-linda-addison/.
. Ibid.
. Bonnie J. Barthold, Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean, and the
United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 3.

Chapter 1. The Importance of Neglected Intersections

. Yolanda Hood and Gwendolyn D. Pough, “Speculative Black Women:
Magic, Fantasy, and the Supernatural,” Femspec 6, no. 1 (2005).
. Bly, 2014, #700.
. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 13.
. Natasha Patterson, “Cannibalizing Gender and Genre: A Feminist
Re-Vision of George Romero’s Zombie Films,” in Zombie Culture:
Autopsies of the Living Dead, ed. Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette
(Toronto: Scarecrow Press, 2008), 106.
. bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in
Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (New York: New York

Notes to Pages 13–19 

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 University Press, 1999,) 314. Clover does include some raced criticism
of horror, particularly in the second chapter, “Opening Up,” where she
creates and names the problematic horror binary of White Science
and Black Magic common in contemporary horror films. Though race
is included, I deem her use of blackness faulty in that it is employed
to create a critical framework that continues to privilege the journey
and experiences of the white characters she chooses to examine. Her
flirtation with race, and blackness in particular, becomes tangential, for
it exists only to assure the survival of the central white character, who
must adopt the wisdom of blackness while eschewing the trauma and
sociocultural baggage that informs those black epistemologies.
. Brigid Cherry, Horror (New York: Routledge Film Guidebooks, 2009), 176.
. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, 37.
. Cherry, Horror, 174.
. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, 40.
. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1998), 228.
. Calvin Hernton, Sex and Racism in America (New York: Grove Press,
1966), 38.
. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American
Grammar Book,” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 17,
no. 2 (1987): 65–81.
. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, 45.
. Ibid., 144.
. Ibid.
. Patterson, “Cannibalizing Gender and Genre,” 111.
. Ibid., 106.
. Ibid., 113.
. Ibid.
. hooks, “Oppositional Gaze,” 314.
. See Carol Clover, Barbara Creed, Judith Halberstam, Isabel Cristina
Piñedo, and Sue Short.
. See Harry M. Benshoff, Elizabeth Young, William Shakespeare,
Ed Guerrero, and Andrew Curran.
. See also Richard Dyer, “The Role of Stereotypes,” Media Studies: A
Reader (2000): 245–51.

 Notes to Pages 19–23

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 . hooks, “Oppositional Gaze,” 309.
. Annalee Newitz, Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop
Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 105.
. Ibid. 110–11.
. Harry M. Benshoff, “Blaxploitation Horror Films: Generic
Reappropriation or Reinscription?,” Cinema Journal 39, no. 2 (2000):
31–50.
. Ibid., 33.
. Ibid., 38.
. Ibid., 39.
. Ibid., 31.
. Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman
(New York: Dial Press, 1979), 107.
. Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, “Keeping Up Appearances, Getting Fed
Up: The Embodiment of Strength among African American Women,”
Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 5, no. 2 (2005): 104–23.
. Ibid., 105.
. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Greenwich, CT:
Fawcett, 1937).
. Trudier Harris, “This Disease Called Strength: Some Observations on
the Compensating Construction of Black Female Character,” Literature
and Medicine 14, no. 1 (1995): 109–26.
. Beauboeuf-Lafontant, “Keeping Up Appearances,” 32.
. This difference is highlighted against Sugar’s everyday professional style,
which is relaxed and more European in styling and texture (Benshoff,
“Blaxploitation Horror Films,” 31).
. Robin R. Means Coleman racially genders the “final girl” in Horror
Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (2011)
with the archetype she refers to as “The Enduring Woman.” Means
Coleman similarly revises the problematic nature of the strong black
woman but limits her readings to 1970s black horror films. The Enduring
Woman is often highly sexualized, fights on behalf of her man as well
as her own life, and, most important, fights against the boogeymen of
racism and corruption.
. See Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,”
American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151–74.

Notes to Pages 23–27 

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 . Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American
Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 23.
. Ibid.
. Ibid., 32.
. “Looking back” is a purposeful conflation of bell hooks’s theories of
“talking back” and “the oppositional gaze.”
. hooks, “Oppositional Gaze,” 307.
. The Urban Dictionary defines the eye-fuck as “to look at someone in a
deliberately threatening or hostile manner.” [Link].
. hooks, “Oppositional Gaze,” 307.
. Ibid., 308.
. Ibid.
. Ibid.; Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An
Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2001).
. hooks, “Oppositional Gaze,” 316.
. Ibid., 308.
. Ibid., 312.
. Ibid., 316.
. Though 28 Days Later (2002) and The Walking Dead (2003) contain white
males as their central characters, both texts feature significant black
female characters, which I would refer to as costars, for their stories
develop into central plot points.
. Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in Re-vision: Essays in
Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Mary Anne Doane, Patricia Mellencamp,
and Linda Williams (Frederick, MD: University Publications of
America, 1984), 62.
. Cherry, Horror, 176; Benshoff, “Blaxploitation Horror Films,” 32.
. Patricia Hill Collins defines disjunctures as those small gaps of time and
interstitiality—early morning before a family wakes up or late at night
once they have gone to bed—when motherwork (the work a mother
must do in order to ensure the success and preparation of her family)
gets done. I expand Collins’s definition of disjunctures to include those
gaps in narrative and/or image that contain subversive potential when
applying the oppositional gaze and use it interchangeably with hooks’s
own term, “ruptures.”

 Notes to Pages 27–30

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 . Patterson, “Cannibalizing Gender and Genre,” 113.
. In her book Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film
Viewing (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1997), Isabel
Cristina Piñedo gives a detailed account of the five characteristics that
construct what she defines as “postmodern horror,” which include a
violent disruption of the everyday world; a transgression and violation of
boundaries; the validity of rationality is thrown into question; there is no
narrative closure; and the film produces a bounded experience of fear.
. I only examine Kirkman’s initial construction of Michonne. The Walking
Dead is an ongoing comic book series that proves popular as it continues
even at the writing of this book. Trade paperbacks 4–6 concern her
construction as a raced example of Clover’s rape-revenge protagonist, a
classic horror trope that is presented within this zombie text. Michonne
eventually becomes a more complex character, as Kirkman takes ample
advantage of the slow character building that comic book structure
allows its creators. Still, I insist that Michonne’s introduction to the
series is particularly problematic in the sociocultural context of black
women and aids in my reimagining of Clover’s horror trope.
. The Governor is the ruthless leader of a parallel group of survivors
located in Woodbury, Georgia. He sees other groups of survivors as
enemies, particularly when they fail to operate under his dictatorship.
He tortures Rick, Glenn, and Michonne to glean information about the
prison their band of survivors currently occupies.
. Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, “You Have to Show Strength: An
Exploration of Gender, Race, and Depression,” Gender & Society 21, no. 1
(2007): 28–51.
. Beauboeuf-Lafontant, “Keeping Up Appearances,” 106.
. Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn, The Walking Dead,
vol. 4, The Heart’s Desire (Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2005).
. Ibid.
. At this point in the story, Michonne is the only woman of color.
. Kirkman, Adlard, and Rathburn, Heart’s Desire.
. Ibid.
. Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn, The Walking Dead,
vol. , The Best Defense (Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, ).
. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 16.

Notes to Pages 31–34 

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 . Kirkman, Adlard, and Rathburn, Best Defense.
. Dorri R. Beam, Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century
American Women’s Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2010), 177.
. Carla Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African American Women Speakers
and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (New York: Oxford University Press,
1995), 17.
. Ibid.
. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 24.
. Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn, The Walking Dead,
vol. 6, This Sorrowful Life (Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2007).
. Ibid.
. Ibid.
. The powerhouse publishers of the comic book industry have always been
and continue to be DC Comics and Marvel Comics.

Chapter 2. Black Feminism and the Struggle

for Literary Respectability
. I use the term “literary theory” in a sense that is textually inclusive.
I expand beyond novels and short stories to include film, comic books,
graphic novels, and so forth.
. S. Jackson, “Terrans, Extraterrestrials, Warriors and the Last (Wo)man
Standing,” African Identities 7 no. 2 (May 2009): 237–53; Susana M. Morris,
“Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E.
Butler’s Fledgling,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40 nos. 3–4 (Fall/
Winter 2012): 146–66; Gina Wisker, “Your Buried Ghosts Have a Way
of Tripping You Up: Revisioning and Mothering in African-American
and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Speculative Horror,” Femspec 6, no. 1
( June 2005): 71–81.
. Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-
American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 4.
. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness,
and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990), 22.
. There are, of course, many outliers of black feminist theory outside of
this almost twenty-year period—for example, Mary McLeod Bethune,

 Notes to Pages 34–44

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 Kimberly Crenshaw, and others. For my critical purposes, I focus on this
incredibly productive period when contemporary black feminist theory
began articulating and fighting for its identity.
. Critic Hazel V. Carby describes herself writing within the “black
women’s renaissance,” marked by “the contemporary discovery and
recognition of black women by the corporate world of academia,
publishing, and Hollywood” as well as the celebrity status of Alice
Walker and Toni Morrison. (Carby, Reconstructing, 7).
. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the
Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: But Some of Us Are Brave: Black
Women’s Studies (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1993), xviii.
. Deborah E. McDowell, “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism,”
Black American Literature Forum 14 (1980): 153–59. For brevity’s sake,
I am presenting a somewhat reductive articulation on black feminist
theory. Black feminist theory has also conducted excellent work on how
black women’s sexuality and class status have also worked as oppressive
identities.
. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 8.
. See Barbara Christian’s later essays, such as “Diminishing Returns: Can
Black Feminism Survive the Academy? (1994)” in New Black Feminist
Criticism, 1985–2000. Ed. Gloria Bowles, M. Giulia Fahi, and Arlene
Keizer (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010).
. I acknowledge that the culling and differentiation of the more
academically esteemed label of literature from the sea of fiction writing
are primary tasks of the literary critic. I also recognize that multiple
parameters are applied when bestowing this title that move beyond the
quality of the writing. Timeliness of its themes, availability of texts, and
being published in certain languages and by certain publishers are all
measurements of the “worthiness” of literature that are subject to
political machinations. My critique concerns itself with all of these
different influences.
. Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of
Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 24.
. Qtd. in ibid., 23.
. Qtd. in ibid., 21.
. Qtd. in ibid., 48.

Notes to Pages 44–46 

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 . This practice is in direct contrast to the patriarchal notions of classic
literature, particularly the idea that an author must metaphorically kill
and separate himself from his literary forefathers, disavowing their
literary influences. Critic Harold Bloom defines this complicated
relationship in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1973). The most well known example in African
American literature remains the complex literary relationships between
Richard Wright and his literary forefather, Ralph Ellison, as well as his
literary descendent, James Baldwin.
. Pages 73–158 feature excerpts and critical contextualization on Harper’s
Iola Leroy (1892), “Sappho” from her novel Contending Forces (1900),
“Bro’r Abr’m Jimson’s Wedding: A Christmas Story (1901) by Hopkins,
and Williams’s “The Colored Girl” (1905).
. Mary Helen Washington, Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women
1860–1960 (Rockland, MA: Anchor Press, 1987), 75–76.
. Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition,
1892–1976 (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger: 1980), 5.
. These are only a few of the leading scholars who took up the burden of
literary race work. This list is not exhaustive. I mention other leading
black feminist literary scholars throughout this section.
. Stephanie J. Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black
Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2010), 14.
. Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” in African
American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York:
New York University Press, 2000), 159.
. Ibid., 160.
. Ibid., 159.
. Barbara Christian, “But What Do We Think We’re Doing Anyway:
The State of Black Feminist Criticism or My Version of a Little Bit of
History (1989),” in New Black Feminist Criticism, 10.
. Ibid., 11.
. Ibid., 16.
. Ibid., 13–14.
. Barbara Christian, “Whose Canon Is It Anyway? (1994),” in New Black
Feminist Criticism, 186.

 Notes to Pages 47–50

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 . Barbara Christian, “Diminishing Returns: Can Black Feminism Survive
the Academy? (1994),” in New Black Feminist Criticism, 215.
. It is necessary to note that my assertions remain limited to the beliefs
and actions of Barbara Christian and her critical black feminist legacy.
Some black feminist scholars have never shied away from the speculative
nature of black feminist writing. For example, Trudier Harris’s insistence
upon reading black women’s writing through a folkloric framework
has allowed her to wrestle with the speculative and the supernatural
throughout her criticism. See Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni
Morrison (1993) and The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora
Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996).
. Email conversation with Mae G. Henderson, August 21, 2013.
. Jewelle Gomez, “Speculative Fiction and Black Lesbians,” Signs:
Theorizing Lesbian Experience 18, no. 4 (1993): 952.
. Ibid., 950.
. Jewelle Gomez, interview by author, spring 2014.
. There has since been an onslaught of criticism concerning Octavia Butler
and her work. I am limiting my critique to the peak of black feminist
theory’s creation I set earlier in the chapter, the late 1970s to early 1990s.
. Charles R. Saunders, “Why Blacks Should Read (and Write) Science
Fiction,” American Visions 15, no. 5 (2000): 399–400.
. Ibid., 400.
. Gomez, “Speculative Fiction and Black Lesbians,” 951.
. A full analysis of Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) can be found in
chapter 4 of this text.
. Alberto Ríos, “Magical Realism: Definitions,” [Link]
.[Link]/~aarios/resourcebank/definitions/.
. Saunders, “Why Blacks Should Read (and Write) Science Fiction,” 400.
. Christian, “Diminishing Returns,” 215.

Chapter 3. Black Women Writing Fluid Fiction

. See Cheryl Walls’s concept of “worrying the lines” in this book’s
introduction, note 3.
. The genre definitions I have chosen to use are not perfect—none
of them are. I have chosen the Library of Congress’s definitions as

Notes to Pages 51–57 

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 generalizations to move this conversation on genre confusion forward
and bring in other critics.
. Library of Congress, Humanities and Social Sciences Division, “Library
of Congress Policy Statements: Fantasy and Science Fiction,” ed. Library
of Congress (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2008), 8.
. Robin Wood, “Return of the Repressed,” Film Comment 14, no. 4 (1978): 25.
. Library of Congress, Humanities and Social Sciences Division, “Library
of Congress Policy Statements: Fantasy and Science Fiction,” 2.
. Ibid.
. Ibid.
. Ibid.
. This reality is reflected in the conflated association of these three genres
in critical discussions and popular culture. Many critics and a majority of
fans and publishers denote this genre conflation and confusion with the
aid of the “/”. It is very common to see these genres discussed as science
fiction/fantasy/horror, S/F/F, and even SFF. I at times use this shorthand
to illuminate the genres’ entanglement with each other.
. Serling also wrote the original screenplay of Planet of the Apes (1968).
. Clarke is broadly considered one of the fathers of contemporary science
fiction and the icon who cowrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, a foundational
science fiction film adapted from the manuscript of his 1968 novel of the
same name.
. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
. Ibid.
. Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the
Possible (New York: Bantam Books, 1967).
. John Clute and John Grant, “Encyclopedia of Fantasy: Introduction to
the Online Text,” in Encyclopedia of Fantasy, ed. John Clute and John
Grant (London: Orbit, 1997).
. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, eds., The Cambridge Companion
to Fantasy Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1.
. Ibid.
. Sylvia Kelso, “Out of Egypt: Histories of Speculative Fiction and Carole
McDonnell’s Wind Follower,” Extrapolation 51, no. 1 (2010): 84.
. Clute and Grant, “Encyclopedia of Fantasy.”
. Ibid.

 Notes to Pages 57–63

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 . Ibid.
. Ibid.
. Ibid.
. Gwendolyn D. Pough, and Yolanda Hood, “Speculative Black Women:
Magic, Fantasy, and the Supernatural,” Femspec 6, no. 1 (2005): ix.
. Robert A. Heinlein, “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction” (1947),
138–56.
. Speculative fiction truly is everywhere. The Speculative Literature
Foundation ([Link]) appeals to critics and authors by
offering grants, fellowships, and awards as well as links to publishers and
writing workshops. Strange Horizons is a weekly e-magazine that acts as
a trade magazine as well as publishing the best new literatures. Finally,
there exists [Link], or The Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
. N. E. Lilly, “What Is Speculative Fiction?” Green Tentacles, March 2002,
[Link]
. Susana M. Morris, “Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist
Feminism in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly
40 (Fall/Winter 2012): 152.
. David Wyatt, “Speculative Fiction,” December 10, 2007/March 29, 2014,
[Link]
. Gregory E. Rutledge and Nalo Hopkinson, “Speaking in Tongues: An
Interview with Science Fiction Writer Nalo Hopkinson,” African
American Review 33, no. 4 (1999): 589.
. Pough and Hood, “Speculative Black Women.”
. Ibid., xi.
. Ibid.
. Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness
and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2002). I purposely
conflate past, present, and future, for I insist that the fluid nature of
black women’s genre writing collapses and rejects the supposed linear
nature of time. The African influence of these women’s works perpetuates
the West African ideal of Sankofa—in which the past, present, and
future are equally important and exist as one.
. Nnedi Okorafor, “Organic Fantasy,” African Identities 7, no. 2 (2009): 277.
. Sandra Jackson and Julie Moody-Freeman, “The Genre of Science
Fiction and the Black Imagination,” African Identities 7, no. 2 (2009): 128.

Notes to Pages 63–67 

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 Jackson and Moody-Freeman begin their editorial note by successfully
explicating the nuances of speculative fiction. Unfortunately, toward the
end, the editors begin to conflate science fiction, fantasy, and speculative
fiction into one umbrella term, science fiction, for the rest of their
journal issue. Their problematic—yet wholly understandable—
decision supports my contention that many of the aforementioned
terms, especially speculative fiction, fail to address the particular needs
of black women genre writers.
. Ibid., 129.
. Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany,
Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” South Atlantic Quarterly 92, no. 4 (1993): 735
(emphasis added).
. Mark Sinker, “Loving the Alien in Advance of the Landing—Black
Science Fiction,” WIRE 96 (February 1992).
. Dery, “Black to the Future,” 735.
. Ibid.
. Ancient Egypt is certainly not the only African empire that exists in
Afrofuturistic writing and visual arts, but there is certainly a heavy
preponderance for that time period.
. Afrofuturism’s “problem with the past” is being critically examined by
proponents of the framework. Alondra Nelson edited a special volume of
the journal Social Text centering on “works [that] represent
new directions in the study of African diaspora culture that are
grounded in the histories of black communities, rather than seeking
to sever all connections to them.” Nelson and other Afrofuturists are
openly expanding the framework’s theoretical territory—things are
changing. I choose to address the central tenets of Afrofuturism even
as I acknowledge its rich contemporary offerings. See Alondra Nelson,
“Introduction: Future Texts,” Social Text 20, no. :2 (2002): 1–15.
. Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: The
New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 293, 294.
. Marleen S. Barr, ed., Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science
Fiction’s Newest Wave Trajectory (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
2008), xv.
. Mark Bould, “The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black
SF,” Science Fiction Studies (2007): 182.

 Notes to Pages 67–71

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 . bell hooks, “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” in Yearning: Race, Gender,
and Cultural Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1990).
. Jewelle Gomez, “The Second Law of Thermodynamics: Transcription of
a Panel at the 1997 Black Speculative Fiction Writers Conference Held
at Clark Atlanta University,” in Dark Matter: Reading the Bones,
ed. Sheree R. Thomas (Ringgold, GA: Aspect, 2004), 416.
. Literary respectability politics are the set of paradigms constructed by
early black feminist literary theorists to privilege the writings of certain
black women authors in order to breach the politics of the academy.
See chapter 2.
. hooks, “Homeplace,” 19.
. Nalo Hopkinson, Skin Folk (New York: Aspect, 2001), 223.
. Patricia Hill Collins explores these issues in-depth in her text Black
Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism
(New York: Routledge, 2004).
. Hopkinson, Skin Folk, 240.
. Ibid., 243.
. Ibid., 244.
. Ibid.
. bell hooks, “The Politics of Radical Black Subjectivity,” in Yearning: Race,
Gender, and Cultural Politics, 20.
. Ibid., 15.
. Ibid., 104.
. Ibid., 21.
. Nalo Hopkinson, “Introduction,” in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial
Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan
(Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004), 8.
. hooks, “Politics of Radical Black Subjectivity,” 15.
. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness
and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990), 145.
. Ibid., 148.
. See the following: Gina Wisker, “Celebrating Difference and
Community: The Vampire in African-American and Caribbean
Women’s Writing,” in Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood,
ed. Tabish Khair and Johan Höglund (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012), 46–66; Lee Skallerup Bessette, “‘They Can Fly’: The Postcolonial

Notes to Pages 72–77 

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 Black Body in Nalo Hopkinson’s Speculative Short Fiction,” in The
Postcolonial Short Story; Contemporary Essays, ed. Maggie Awadallo and
Paul March-Russell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 167–81;
Marlene D. Allen, “Tricksterism, Masquerades, and the Legacy of
the African Diasporic Past in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber,”
in Afterimages of Slavery: Essays on Appearances in Recent American Films,
Literature, Television and Other Media, ed. Marlene D. Allen and Seretha
D. Williams ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 76–88.
. Nalo Hopkinson, “Greedy Choke Puppy,” in Skin Folk (2001), 174.
. Ibid., 170.
. Ibid., 176.
. Ibid.
. Ibid., 178.
. Clarke, Profiles of the Future.
. See Kinitra D. Brooks, Maternal Inheritances: Trinity Formations and
Constructing Self-Identities in Stigmata and Louisiana, vol. 12 (San
Francisco: Femspec, 2012).
. The female protagonist is never physically described. It is heavily sug-
gested that she is of African descent. Her parents are described as being
brown-skinned, and her fiancé is of Nigerian Ibo descent. Also, Butler’s
well-established precedence for writing black female protagonists in the
majority of her works supports my racialized reading of the central character.
. Octavia Butler, “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” Callaloo
24, no. 2 (2001): 401.
. Ibid., 411.
. Ibid., 414.
. Ibid.
. Hopkinson frequently mentions Octavia Butler as an influence and
mentor. Since Butler’s death, Hopkinson is one of many who work
tirelessly to continue Butler’s literary legacy of black women in so-called
speculative fiction.
. Ibid., 402, 409.
. Ibid., 415.
. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Random House, 1998), 174.
. Though the story collection Skin Folk holds a copyright date of 2001,
Hopkinson’s exposition of Jacky’s intellectual success and her incessant

 Notes to Pages 78–82

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 need to measure herself against her lack of domestic success appears
almost prescient of the black woman marriage crisis of the early
twenty- first century. The public concern trolling of the marriage
prospects for successful black women began with the rising prevalence
of the Obamas as they were swept into the White House in 2008,
solidified with a Nightline special in December 2009, and reached
a frenzied crescendo in the spring and summer of 2010 as both the
Economist and the New York Times featured articles analyzing the lack of
marriage prospects for single educated black women. [Link]
.[Link]/blog/archives/2010/06/21/the-media-v-black-women-the-
peculiar-case-of-the-media%E2%80%99s-obsession-with-unmarried-
black-women/.
. Nalo Hopkinson, Skin Folk (New York: Warner Books, 2001), 180.
“Doux-doux” is a Caribbean term of endearment derived from the
French. It literally means sweet-sweet and translates to sweetie,
sweetheart, or sweetness.
. These gods are from traditional African religions mostly associated
with the Yoruba peoples of West Africa. I also refer to these gods
interchangeably as orishas and loas, which are from the Santeria and
Vodou traditions, respectively. I do this as an acknowledgment of
Hopkinson’s purposeful use of the Yoruban traditions as they mani-
fested in the New World through the religious practices of enslaved
Africans who wisely blended their worship practices with the
Catholicism/Christianity of their Spanish (Santeria) and French
(Vodou) enslavers. These were the peoples that populated the
Caribbean, and it is their traditions and their foundational cultural
influences that Hopkinson repeatedly and openly acknowledges in her
works.
. Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine (New York: Hachette, 2013).
. Ibid., 42.
. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert,
Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and
Santeria to Obeah and Espiritismo (New York: New York University
Press, 2003), 117.
. Hopkinson, Sister Mine, 29.
. Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions of the Caribbean, 39.

Notes to Pages 82–85 

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 . Ibid., 120. There are multiple manifestations of Vodou in Africa and its
diaspora. I focus my readings of Vodou in Hopkinson’s work,
specifically on Haitian Vodou—with some deviation into New Orleans
Vodou, which is incredibly similar.
. Ibid. Lwa and loa are interchangeable and simply different spellings of
the same verbal sound (low-ah) and concept. This is because Haitian
Creole or patois owes it origins to its oral culture and not the written
word; therefore, spellings of the loas contain some variation across
different parts of Haiti and are manifested in the texts associated with
Vodou. From phone interview with Jude Michel, Vodou Mambo or
priestess, practicing over fifteen years, on April 8, 2013.
. [Link]
. Rutledge and Hopkinson, “Speaking in Tongues,” 592.
. Hopkinson, Sister Mine, 95.
. [Link]
. Hopkinson, Sister Mine, 98.
. Ibid., 32.
. Ibid., 69.
. Mambo Chita Tann, Haitian Vodou: An Introduction to Haiti’s Indigenous
Spiritual Tradition (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Worldwide, 2012), 103.
. [Link]
. Hopkinson, Sister Mine, 32.
. [Link]
. Hopkinson, Sister Mine, 98.
. Baron Samedi is a well-known popular cultural figure. Baron Samedi has
featured prominently in the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973),
as portrayed by Geoffrey Holder. Dr. Facilier, the villain in Disney’s The
Princess and the Frog (2009), is a watered-down version of Baron Samedi,
so he is more palatable for a children’s film. Baron Samedi also features
prominently in the fifth season, episode nineteen, of the television series
Supernatural (2005–), titled “Hammer of the Gods.”
. [Link]
. Hopkinson, Sister Mine, 94. A Kalashnikov is the name given to a series of
assault rifles invented by Soviet Mikhail Kalashnikov just after World War II.
The most popular Kalashnikov weapon is the AK-47. See [Link]
.[Link]/smallarms/[Link] for more information.

 Notes to Pages 85–88

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 . [Link]
. Ibid.
. Hopkinson, Sister Mine, 97.
. Ibid., 98.
. Ochosi and Ogun are the best of friends—along with Eleggua, the
three are considered inseparable. Along with the orisha Osun, the four
orishas are “The Warriors”—“one of the initiations a person receives
making him an Aborish or worshipper of the orishas. [Eleggua], Ogun,
and Ochosi work together to help a person’s spiritual development.
Eleggua opens the road, Ogun clears it and Ochosi helps that person
attain their goal as easily as possible, like the straight shot of his arrow.”
[Link]
. Ibid.
. Hopkinson, Sister Mine, 98.
. [Link]
. Hopkinson, Sister Mine, 98.
. Henry Louis Gates Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-
American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 30.
. Nnedi Okorafor, “Organic Fantasy,” African Identities 7 no. 2 (May
2009): 278.
. Ibid.
. Rutledge and Hopkinson, “Speaking in Tongues,” 592–93.
. Hopkinson, Sister Mine, 57.
. Ibid.
. Marshall, Paule. “From the Poets in the Kitchen.” Callaloo 18 (1983): 22–30.
. Rutledge and Hopkinson, “Speaking in Tongues,” 600.
. Marshall, “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” 50.
. Ibid., 50.
. Rutledge and Hopkinson, “Speaking in Tongues,” 601.

Chapter 4. Folkloric Horror

. Scholar Teresa N. Washington refers to Àjé (ashe) as a spiritual life
force thst is divinely female in its source. Teresa N. Washington, Our
Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Àjé in Africana
literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3–16.

Notes to Pages 88–96 

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 . The ghede are the spirits of the dead from the Haitian Vodoun tradition.
They are celebrated annually during Fete Ghede, a religious holiday that
acknowledges the power and the presence of the dead in the daily lives
of African diasporic peoples.
. Lene Brøndum, “‘The Persistence of Tradition’: The Retelling of Sea
Islands Culture in Works by Julie Dash, Gloria Naylor, and Paule
Marshall,” in Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 153–163 (qtd. in Venetria K. Patton’s The Grasp
That Reaches Beyond the Grave).
. Venetria K. Patton, The Grasp That Reaches Beyond the Grave: The Ancestral
Call in Black Women’s Texts (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013), 9.
. The Bram Stoker Award is given by the Horror Writers Association and
is awarded each year at the World Horror Convention.
. I would like to reiterate that both of these successful writers enthusiasti-
cally support and mentor rising black women genre/horror writers.
. “We must learn how to see.” bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and
Cultural Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1990), 111–12.
. [Link]
. [Link]
horror-fiction/ as well as [Link]
nineteen-more-black-women-in-horror-writing-list-3/.
. [Link]
dp/1496112946.
. [Link]
. “Magical Realism,” Oxford Reference Online, [Link]
[Link]/view/10.1093/
acref/9780199532919.001.0001/acref-9780199532919-e-422?rskey=0g
J0CN&result=1.
. “Just as long as they don’t call me a magical realist, as though I don’t
have a culture to write out of. As though that culture has no intellect.”
“Living Memory: A Meeting with Toni Morrison,” Black Atlantic
Exchanges, 181.
. [Link]
[Link].
. Ibid.
. hooks, Yearning, 164.

 Notes to Pages 96–101

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 . Ibid., 166.
. Ibid., 174.
. Ibid., 172.
. Nnedi Okorafor, “Organic Fantasy,” African Identities 7, no. 2 (2009):
275–86.
. Gwendolyn D. Pough and Yolanda Hood. “Speculative Black Women:
Magic, Fantasy, and the Supernatural,” Femspec 6, no. 1 (2005).
. Ibid., 4
. For an example of the problematic ways in which mainstream horror
texts treat traditional African religions, see the following books and
films: White Zombie (1932); I Walked with a Zombie (1943) dir. Jacques
Tourneur; Darkfall (1984) by Dean Koontz; The Serpent and the Rainbow
(1988) dir. Wes Craven; The Believers (1987) dir. John Schlesinger; Angel
Heart (1987) dir. Alan Parker. A contemporary film that is subversive to
this tradition is Kate Hudson’s 2005 vehicle, The Skeleton Key dir. Iain
Softley.
. John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Gaborone, Botswana:
Heinemann Education Botswana, 1969), 79.
. Ibid., 82.
. Patton, Grasp That Reaches Beyond the Grave, 17.
. Ibid., 16.
. Ibid.
. Kinitra D. Brooks, “Maternal Inheritances: Trinity Formations and
Constructing Self-identities in Stigmata and Louisiana,” Femspec 12, no.
2 (2012): 19–58.
. The practice of dressing in all-white is derived from the Yoruban
religious practice of Ifa. It also has passed down to syncretized versions
of Ifa—Santeria, Vodoun, and Candomble. Practitioners are expected
to wear white during different ceremonies and as they perform certain
cleansings/limpias.
. A female priestess of Vodou is a called a Mambo, while an advanced
female practitioner/priestess of Santeria is a Santera, and an Obeah
woman practices obeah, a spiritual practice established in Jamaica with a
foundation in traditional African religions.
. Interview with Arek Samuels, practitioner, June 11, 2016.
. [Link]

Notes to Pages 101–108 

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 . Some versions of “Chocolate Park” also contain a white family struggling
in the tenement. I choose not to examine this family for my analysis and
focus upon Lady Black.
. Lady Black is originally from Haiti. I suspect she works with the hot/
Petro/Petwo loas of Haitian Vodou.
. Lady Black’s flashing red eyes solidify my assertion that she is a
practitioner of Haitian Vodou. Erzulie Red Eyes, a manifestation of the
loa Erzulie Dantor, is a spirit of feminine vengeance.
. Again, I suspect New Orleans Vodou. The story takes place in
New Orleans, and Rosamojo is known to wear what is often referred to
as a gris-gris bag, a small bag containing protective objects and blessings
unique to the wearer, around her neck.
. Kiini Ibura Salaam, “Rosamojo,” Ancient, Ancient (Seattle, WA:
Aqueduct Press, 2012), Location 1371.
. Ibid., 1384.
. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 78.
. Ibid., 78–79.
. “Blues and sacred music are joined at the hip. Most blues musicians
grow up in the church where as children they learn to sing hymns and
spirituals. One blues musician told me that if a singer wants to cross
over from sacred music to the blues, he simply replaces ‘my God’ with
‘my baby’ and continues singing the same song.” William Ferris, Give My
Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2009).
. Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American
Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 12.
. Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 2–3.
. Kameelah L. Martin, Conjuring Moments in African American Literature:
Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012), 1–2.
. Harris, Fiction and Folklore, 3.
. Martin, Conjuring Moments in African American Literature, 161.
. Chireau, Black Magic, 23, 24.
. Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey,
Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 5.

 Notes to Pages 109–116

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 . Ibid., 6.
. Ibid., 6, 8.
. Chireau, Black Magic, 147, 148, 150 (emphasis added).
. Ibid., 148.
. Martin, Conjuring Moments in African American Literature, 128.
. Ibid.
. Chireau, Black Magic, 145; Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 128.
. Martin, Conjuring Moments in African American Literature,
see chapter 4, “Of Blues Narratives and Conjure Magic: A Symbiotic
Dialectic.”
. Farah Jasmine Griffin, “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black
Women’s Vocality,” in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed.
Robert O’Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012), 110.
. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 11.
. Ibid., 13.
. Ibid.
. Chireau, Black Magic, 24.
. Paul Garon and Beth Garon, Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s
Blues (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 45.
. Chireau, Black Magic, 140.
. Ibid., 147.
. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 130.
. Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and
Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 3.
. Garon and Garon, Woman with Guitar, 5.
. For more information on the distinction between these blues eras—as
well as the complex gender politics it represents—see Hazel V. Carby’s
“It Just Be’s Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues”
(1986), Paul and Beth Garon’s Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s
Blues (1992), and Steven C. Tracy’s “To the Tune of Those Weary Blues:
The Influence of the Blues Tradition in Langston Hughes’s Blues
Poems” (1981).
. Garon and Garon, Woman with Guitar, 99.
. See ibid., 50–53, as the authors describe the process of divining Memphis
Minnie as the writer and composer of all of her songs. Minnie lists her

Notes to Pages 116–121 

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 second husband on all of her later copyrights, but as an apparent peace
offering for her atypical economic and temperamental independence.
. Ibid., 45.
. Ibid., 22.
. Ibid.
. Gabriel Solis’s talk at AstroBlackness 2: The Surreal, The Speculative,
and The Spooky, Loyola Marymount University, March 12–13, 2015.
. Langston Hughes, “Here to Yonder,” in PL Jazzbook (1947).
. Daphne A. Brooks, “Nina Simone’s Triple Play,” Callalo 34, no. 3
(Winter 2011): 181.
. Danielle C. Heard, “‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’: Nina Simone’s
Theater of Invisibility,” Callaloo 35, no. 4 (Fall 2012): 1057.
. Melanie E. Bratcher, Words and Songs of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and
Nina Simone: Sound Motion, Blues Spirit, and African Memory, 1st ed.
(London: Taylor and Francis, 2007).
. [Link]
. What Happened, Miss Simone?, dir. Liz Garbus. Netflix, 2015.
. Legend has it that Hawkins recorded the outrageous version of the
song while being “blackout drunk” at the behest of his producer, Maxim.
Multiple articles cite a 1991 Los Angeles Times interview with Hawkins.
Unfortunately, the short Times interview does not mention this
particular story.
. Musicologist Gabriel Solis’s remarks are taken from his talk at Astro
Blackness 2 on the panel “I’ll Put a Spell On You: The Supernatural in
Black Music.” Solis names Simone’s live performances of “I’ll Put a Spell
On You” as “incredibly subversive” as compared to the recorded version.
My argument pushes Solis further by directly naming Simone as a
conjure woman in the live performance.
. Heard, “‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,’” 1072.

Conclusion
. [Link]
womans-skin-and-still-be-a-feminist-icon/.
. The reading of this verse using the horror framework of the Boo Hag
came about mutually in various conversations with scholar John Jennings.

 Notes to Pages 121–128

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 . The Gullah people are descendants of West Africans brought to the
sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia to be enslaved. They have
retained many of their cultural traditions, which are directly linked to
West Africa. More information can be found at their official website:
[Link]
. “Shift” is a short story that has yet to be officially published. It is due to
be published later this year. The author has provided a preview copy of
the short story that has yet to be formatted and still exists in Microsoft
Word document form.
. Nalo Hopkinson admits to being “obsessed” with mermaids in a
discussion with the author during multiple discussions while attending
AstroBlackness 2: The Surreal, The Speculative, and The Spooky at
Loyola Marymount University, March 12–13, 2015. In fact, the mermaid/
octopus woman figure features prominently on the program schedule—
drawn by art and pop culture scholar John Jennings.
. Scylla and Charybdis are water deities from Greek mythology. Both
are considered monstrous, and Scylla, the half-octopus/half-woman, is
particularly associated as an early incarnation of the monstrous feminine.
Charybdis manifests as a powerful whirlpool. Odysseus confronts both
monsters in Homer’s The Odyssey.
. Hopkinson, “Shift,” 14.
. Ibid., 14–15.
. Ibid., 15.
. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 128–132 

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EBSCOhost - printed on 11/3/2023 4:37 PM via . All use subject to [Link]
 Index

Abby (1974), 13, 25, 134 blackness, 20, 33, 35, 71, 171n5; and
Addison, Linda, 14, 99 Afrofuturism, 68, 70–71; in horror,
aesthetic theory, 72, 75, 98. See also black 23–24, 55
woman’s horror aesthetic Blackwell, Ashlee, 13, 101
African diaspora, 37, 68–69, 91, 182n43; black woman’s horror aesthetic, 12, 100–
folklore of, 97, 115, 128; women of, 103, 109, 127, 132
77–78, 82–83, 93 Blacula (1972), 13, 24–26, 55, 139, 157
African religions, 85–86, 102–3, 108, 131; blaxploitation, 23, 27, 55, 142, 147; and
gods of, 185n84; in literature, 106–8, horror, 13, 23–25, 134, 139
110, 112. See also Candomblé; Obeah; Bleach series, 17, 139
Santería; Vodou blues music, 114, 116–22, 124–25, 191n69;
Afrofuturism, 68–71, 182nn42–43 and religion, 114, 116–17, 126, 190n42
Apocalypse, 82, 159, 167n5 blueswoman, 98, 114, 116–22, 124–26; and
art-horror, 4–5, 168n10 conjure woman, 15, 98, 114, 116–20
AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004), 16, 137, Boo Hag, The, 128–29, 192n2
167n4 Boyle, Danny, 31–32, 36–38, 167n5; 28 Days
Later, 36, 40, 133, 167n5
Banks, L.A., xi, 99, 164 Brodber, Erna, 98, 104, 107–8, 152–53;
Banks, Ralph Richard, 96 Louisiana, 98, 104–10, 152–53
Barr, Marlene S., 70–71 Brooks, Daphne, 120, 124
Bell, Derrick, 69, 159 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), 136,
Beloved (Morrison), 54, 84, 103, 138 141, 145–46
Benshoff, Harry, 10, 13, 23–25, 30, Burke, Chesya, 56, 66, 98, 109–11
170n26 Butler, Octavia, 52–53, 69, 79–80, 184n73;
Beyoncé, 127–29, 146, 152; Lemonade, criticism of, 53, 179n36; literary legacy
127–28, 152 of, 184n78; summaries of individual
Black Church, 114, 116, 118 works, 144, 166
black feminist theory, 42–46, 48, 176n5,
177n8, 179n36; and horror, 9, 11, 31, 55, Camus, Marcel, 69, 138
97, 129 Candomblé, 104, 189n30
black monstrosity theory, 10, 23, 25–26, Canon. See literary canon
30, 41 Carby, Hazel V., 27, 35, 43, 45, 177n6



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 Caribbean culture, 77, 85–87, 91, 153, 185n84 Du Bois, W.E.B., 25, 69, 143
Caribbean language use, 91–94, 185n83 Due, Tananarive, 66, 98–99, 134–35, 148;
Carroll, Noël, 2, 4–5, 168n10 The Good House, 58, 148; The Living
Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, 100, 115, 143; Blood, 99, 134
The Conjure Woman, 100, 115, 143 Duryea-Gode Disease, 79–81, 144
Chireau, Yvonne P., 114–17
Christian, Barbara, 41, 47–53, 55, 95, 179n31 Egypt, 69, 156, 166, 182n42
Christianity, 104, 117–18, 129, 185n84 Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 62
Clarke, Arthur C., 60–61, 79, 83, 133–34, Enduring Woman, The, 13, 173n39
180n11 English language use, 93–94
classism, 20, 49, 67 Eshun, Kodwo, 70
Cleopatra Jones (1973), 55, 142 Europe, 50, 77–78, 85–86, 131, 147
Clover, Carol, 19, 21–22, 35, 170n26, 172n5, Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-
175n61; and final girl theory, 20–21, 37, tales from the Gulf States (Hurston), 14,
39 100, 144–45
Clute, John, 62–63
Coleman-Means, Robin R., 10, 13, 23, fantasy: defined as, 58–59, 62–65; vs.
42, 173n39; Horror Noire: Black in science fiction, 60. See also organic
American Horror Films from the 1890s fantasy
to Present, 12–13, 42, 173n39 femininity, 22, 33, 35, 46; black, 9, 120;
Collins, Patricia Hill, 26, 74, 76, 174n58 white, 6, 33
colonialism, 68, 140 feminist horror theory, 10
Color Purple, The (Walker), 82, 142 Femspec (journal), 16, 66–67
conjure, 96–97, 104, 114–15; the blues and, final girl, the, 19–22, 31, 37, 39, 173n39
116–18, 120, 126 fluid fiction, 72–76, 94, 102; “Greedy
conjure woman, 54, 104, 114–15, 119–20; Choke Puppy” as, 77–81; Sister Mine
Charmaine as, 96–97; Mama Day as, as, 82–94
54, 104, 108; Memphis Minnie as, 121– folkloric horror, 102–8; in literature, 111–
24; Nina Simone as, 124–26, 192n83 14; in Memphis Minnie, 121–24; in
Conjure Woman, The (Chesnutt), 100, 115, music, 114–20; in Nina Simone, 124–26
143 folktales, 14, 58, 143; Caribbean 78, 145
Cooper, Anna Julia, 43, 48 Fon, 85
creole languages, 78, 93–94, 186n91 Foxy Brown (1974), 55, 147
critical race theory, 11, 24, 29 Freeman, Julie Moody, 67, 181n36

Davis, Angela Y. 116–19 gender, 18–19, 21–23, 25, 38; and sexuality,
Dawn of the Dead (2008), 2, 5–6, 143–44, 25
169n15 genre, 58–60, 179n2
dehumanization, 26, 32 ghosts, 54, 91–92, 115. See also haints
demons, 58, 109, 112, 161 Gomez, Jewelle, 52–53, 101, 147
disease, 3–4, 26, 79–81, 118, 144. See also Good House, The (Due), 58, 148
Duryea-Gode Disease gospel music, 114, 116
disjunctures, 29–30, 76, 100, 174n58 Graveyard Shift Sisters, 99–101
drugs, 109–10, 163; in film, 140, 142, 145, Gullah, 128, 193n3
147, 155, 157 Gynophobia, 12, 18

 Index

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 haints (hant), 8, 14, 83, 91–92, 130
Haiti, 156–58; language of, 186n91; Vodou Jackson, Sandra, 42, 67, 181n36
in, 85, 186nn90–91, 188n2, 190nn35–36 Jamaica, 77, 108, 130, 152, 189n31
Harper, Frances E. W., 43, 47; Iola Leroy, Jemisin, N.K., 63–64, 99; The Hundred
47, 178n17 Thousand Kingdoms, 63–65, 150–51
Harris, Trudier, 26, 114–15, 179n31
Hawkins, Jalacy, 124–25, 192n82; “I’ll Put a King, Stephen, 58, 151, 154, 158
Spell on You,” 124–26, 192nn82–83 Kirkman, Robert, 31–36, 165, 175n61; The
Heard, Danielle, 124–26 Walking Dead, 165, 174n55
Hood, Yolanda, 16, 66–67, 102 Kubrick, Stanley, 60, 133; 2001: A Space
Hoodoo, 104, 108, 114, 117, 143 Odyssey, 60–61, 64, 133–34, 180n11
“Hoodoo Lady” (Minnie), 121–24, 149–50
hooks, bell, 7, 28–29, 74–75, 99, 174n58; Lemonade (Beyoncé), 127–28, 152
and black aesthetics, 75, 113; and literary canon, 14, 45, 47–51, 55, 73
homeplace, 71–72; and oppositional literary respectability, 42, 46–53, 73
gaze, 11, 28–29, 174n44 Living Blood, The (Due), 99, 134
Hopkinson, Nalo, 66, 72–74, 184n78, Louisiana, 104, 147, 152–53, 162, 166
185n84, 193n5; and Afrofuturism, 69; Louisiana (Brodber), 98, 104–10, 152–53
fluid fiction of, 77–94; The Salt Roads,
91, 156; Sister Mine, 82–94; Skin Folk, magical realism, 9, 100
77, 91, 147–48, 158–59, 184n82; and majority viewer, 21–22, 30, 32, 170n26
Sycorax, 130–32 Mama Day (Naylor), 105–10, 153
horror, 1–6, 79, 83, 91–92, 96–98; black marriage, 108, 118–19, 184n82
women in, 8, 101–2; industry of, 99. See Marshall, Paule, 92–93, 140
also folkloric horror Martin, Kameelah L., 114–15, 117–18, 120
Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror masculinity, 20, 25, 33, 35, 37, 70
Films from the 1890s to Present masculinization, 20, 170n28
(Coleman), 12–13, 42, 173n39 Minnie, Memphis, 114, 120–24, 149, 191n71;
Hull, Gloria T., 10, 48 “Hoodoo Lady,” 121–24, 149–50
Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The misogyny, 21, 35
( Jemisin), 63–65, 150–51 Morrison, Toni, 54, 69, 100, 177n6, 188n13;
Hurston, Zora Neale, 14, 26, 47, 144–45; Beloved, 54, 84, 103, 138; Sula, 79, 81, 160
Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk- mother-daughter relationship, 54, 79, 80
tales from the Gulf States, 14, 100, 144–45 motherwork, 37, 76, 86, 174n58
hybridity, 65, 77 myths, 25, 36, 58, 62, 79; Caribbean 78,
82; Greek, 138–39, 193n6; Norse, 85;
identificatory permeability, 19, 21–22, 26, surrounding mermaids, 131; vampire,
30, 32 78
identity, 11, 19, 21, 44; black women’s, 10–11,
26, 75; Caribbean, 77, 85, 93–94; gender, Naylor, Gloria, 53–55, 108, 110, 153; Mama
22; intersections of, 35, 40, 44; multiple, Day, 105–10, 153
25–26, 101–2; sexual, 72 Negrophobia, 12, 18
“I’ll Put a Spell on You” (Hawkins), 124– New Orleans, 105, 107, 111, 136, 147; Vodou
26, 192nn82–83 in, 108, 186n90, 190n37
Iola Leroy (Harper), 47, 178n17 Newsome, Bree, 95, 97, 164

Index 

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 Night of the Living Dead (1968), 24, 155, science fiction horror, 73, 83, 99, 133, 160
167n3, 169n18; synopsis of, 153–54 Scream Blacula Scream (1973), 13, 55, 157
normativity, 8, 12, 20, 34, 40, 60 Scream 2 (1997), ix, 17–18, 157
Serling, Rod, 60, 180n10
Obeah, 102–3, 107–8, 131, 189n31 sexism, 13, 20, 27, 39, 67
Okorafor, Nnedi, 67, 90, 102, 139 sexual abuse, 111, 142
oppositional gaze, 22, 174n44, 174n58; and sexuality, 19, 25, 81, 118, 134; of black
horror, 11, 18, 25, 28–30, women, 27, 31, 34, 44; in blues music,
organic fantasy, 90–92, 102 118; hetero-, 2, 11, 21, 62, 72–73; homo-,
Otherness, 26–27, 33, 121 44, 118; of Michonne, 34, 38–39; of
Selena, 38–39
Patterson, Natasha, 10, 19, 22, 30–31 Shakespeare, William, 7, 55, 130, 161,
Patton, Venetria K., 98, 103, 105 169n22; The Tempest, 7–8, 55, 130, 161–
Piñedo, Isabel Cristina, 2, 4–5, 10, 23, 62, 169n22
175n60 Simone, Nina, 120, 124–26, 192n83. See also
poetry, 93, 127, 152, 156 “I’ll Put a Spell on You”
Pough, Gwendolyn, 16, 66–67, 102 simultaneity of oppressions, xi, 9, 44, 56
Sister Mine (Hopkinson), 82–94; African
race work, 46–47, 178n20 religions in, 85–86; characters in,
racism, 22–23, 25, 35, 43, 67; of the Canon, 84–90; as fluid fiction, 82, 90–92; as
49; in literature, 138, 140, 162, 173n39; of horror, 91–92; magic as science fiction
science fiction, 53 in, 83; syncretism in, 86
rape, 21, 31, 35–36, 39, 167n6 Skin Folk (Hopkinson), 77, 91, 147–48,
rape-revenge protagonist, 19, 21–22, 31, 35, 158–59, 184n82
175n61 slasher films, 19, 39, 148, 154, 157
respectability politics. See literary slavery, 68, 114, 185n84, 193n3; in literature,
respectability 54, 138, 147, 156; and music, 116; women
Romero, George, 22, 24, 30–31, 169nn18– in, 20, 27, 170n28
19; Night of the Living Dead, 24, 155, Smith, Barbara 44, 48–49
167n3, 169n18 Smith, Bessie, 16, 124
“Rosamojo” (Salaam), 109, 111–13, 190n37 Snyder, Zack, 2–3, 5–6, 143–44, 169n15,
Rushdie, Salman, 100 169n19
Solis, Gabriel, 122, 125, 192n83
Salaam, Kiini Ibura, 15, 66, 98, 109, 111–13, speculative fiction, 51–53, 65–68, 179n31,
155; “Rosamojo,” 109, 111–13, 190n37 181n26, 181n36
Salt Roads, The (Hopkinson) 91, 156 stereotypes, 12–13, 25, 171n37; gender, 22, 27,
Santería, 102, 108, 185n84, 189nn30–31; gods 31–34. See also strong black woman
and goddesses in, 85, 127, 189nn30–31 stigmatypes, 13, 26, 171n37
Saulson, Sumiko, 99 strong black woman, 12–13, 25–26, 32,
Saunders, Charles, 53–54 35–37, 173n39; Michonne as, 32–34, 36;
science, 4, 59–62, 79, 83, 171n5 Selena as, 37
science fiction, 57–62, 65, 67–68, 180n9, suffrage, 42–43, 48
180n11, 181n36; black women in, 99; Sugar Hill (1974), 13, 25, 160
defined, 59; expanding, 71; hard vs. Sula (Morrison), 79, 81, 160
soft, 60–61, 79, 83; racism in, 53 Supernova (2002), x, 16–18, 160–61

 Index

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 Sycorax, 7–10, 27, 129–32, 169n22; in horror, Wake (2010), 95–97, 164
10–12, 55, 97, 130 Walker, Alice, 47, 52, 142, 177n6; The Color
Purple, 82, 142
Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 1, 7–8, 55, 130, Walking Dead, The (comic series,
161–62, 169n22 Kirkman), 165, 174n55; Michonne in,
Terrell, Mary Church, 46, 48 17–18, 31–36, 175n61
Toronto, 77, 91, 140–41 Washington, Mary Helen, 47–48
28 Days Later (2002), 36, 40, 133, 167n5; werewolves, 58, 135, 159
black women characters in, 18, 31–32, West African culture, 97, 114, 117–18, 181n34,
174n55; storyline of, 37–39 193n3; fashion, 126; gods, 127, 185n84
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), 60–61, 64, whiteness, 10, 19–22, 24, 30; and
133–34, 180n11 Afrofuturism, 69; lack of, 35
Wood, Robin, 23, 57, 60
vampires, 25, 52, 78–79, 128. See also The
Boo Hag Yoruba, 126, 185n84, 189n30; language, 85, 108
Vodou, 13, 84–85, 107–8, 185n84, 186nn90–
91, 188n2, 189nn30–31, 190nn35–36; zombie horror, 24, 103, 167n3; audience of,
gods of, 26, 84–85, 131; in literature, 30–31; black women in, 17, 19, 22, 31–35,
26–27, 87–88, 148; in New Orleans, 108, 39; criticisms of, 5; infection, 3–4, 167n5;
186n90 racial diversity in, 5; women in, 4, 19, 31

Index 

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 About the Author

Kinitra D. Brooks is an associate professor of English at the Uni-

versity of Texas at San Antonio. Her research interests include
contemporary African American and Afro-Caribbean literature,
black feminism, and horror studies. Her short horror fiction col-
lection Sycorax’s Daughters was coedited with Susana M. Morris
and Linda D. Addison at Cedar Grove Publishing. Currently, she
is working on a book-length exploration of the monstrosity and
divinity of black women’s visual culture tentatively titled Divinely
Monstrous: Black Women Conjuring the Grotesque in Popular Culture.
She is also coediting a volume on black women and horror entitled
Towards a Black Women’s Horror Aesthetic: Critical Frameworks, with
Susana M. Morris and Linda Addison. She has published articles
in African American Review, Obsidian, and Fempsec.

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