Anna Flood

My dissertation project investigates operations of the Afro Gothic in speculative graphic novels that wrestle with slavery and its afterlives. I aim to articulate further ways that literature confronts history’s unresolved hauntings. Equally important, I investigate a reinvention of the past by reimagining engagement with history and regenerating the future through history. First articulating the Afro Gothic, I will additionally establish the Graphic Gothic in these texts as a specific visual form that portrays the violent realities of enslavement and encompasses vast space for imagined potentials of Black futurity. For the purposes of this project, I will define the Graphic Gothic as the visual employment of darkness and obscurity to affectively entice readers. Consequently, I explicate the notion that the Afro-Gothic is a critical language with sufficient emotional depth to untangle the horrors of slavery identifiable in these narratives. Plainly put, the Afro Gothic is the process and strategy that takes indirect or allegorical approaches to reckoning with slavery and its afterlives. The Afro Gothic can be illuminated as a method through which our inner defenses and mental barricades surrounding this dark history of slavery might be broken down. It is the aesthetic form of our collective mourning. Conjoining this with the Graphic Gothic establishes a new way to consider literary portrayals of history.