Review of Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul

“America’s haunted history is Black history.” This is the premise of a new book by Leila Taylor, Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul. A while back, I had the pleasure of attending her lecture on “The Afro-Gothic” at an event run by Morbid Anatomy. The presentation got me thinking about the Gothic in a whole new way, and I was eager for more information than what could fit in a one-hour talk. Luckily, Leila was in the process of writing this book, and now it’s finally out! Darkly, which came out just last week, examines the intersection of goth, the Gothic, and Blackness.

Darkly is a nonfiction work that bridges the personal and the historical by interweaving bits of memoir into cultural analysis. In each chapter, Leila takes an element of the Gothic—monstrousness, the aesthetics of mourning, crumbling houses, a fascination with the color black—and explores how it relates to the experience of being Black in America, and to her personal experience growing up as a Black goth. In each discussion, she draws on a mix of personal reminiscences, historical accounts, classic Gothic literature, horror films, and pop culture (or alt-culture). The text wanders smoothly through loosely connected topics like the meandering paths of Green-Wood Cemetery (one of Leila’s favorite haunts), slowly drawing the reader toward the conclusion: Blackness is inherently gothic, and the American Gothic is inextricably tied up with Black history. From the horrors of slavery to the Jim Crow era and the racism that persists in our society today, American history reads like a Gothic novel where Black people are alternately the monsters, the victims, and the dark secret buried under the floorboards.

One of the things I love about Leila’s writing is the way that she discusses the Gothic literary mode and the goth subculture as two different aspects of a continuous tradition. Many scholars of the goth subculture try to depict it as something separate and distinct from the Gothic literary movement, connected only by a confusing similarity in names and a few surface-level influences like Dracula and vampirism. But Leila acknowledges that though “gothic and goth can mean very different things to different people … they have attributes that run parallel to each other and occasionally overlap.” They have similar aesthetics of “gloom, the macabre, the melancholy, and the romantic,” and they “both take pleasure and comfort in those things that ought to repel and disgust.” Throughout the book, Leila takes a sampling of elements from both goth and the Gothic, blurring them together in a way that highlights how thin those boundaries actually are. For example, her chapter on music, “Screaming It to Death,” obviously draws more heavily on the goth subculture, which was born out of a music genre. But the song she focuses on most, “Strange Fruit,” functions like a work of Southern Gothic literature—revealing the ugly undercurrent of racism evident within the quaint, pastoral landscape of the South. Goth and the Gothic have more in common than you might think—and both have a surprising amount in common with the Black experience.

Though the book delves into some dark and distressing topics, Leila ends on a positive note about what the Gothic has to offer to Black audiences. Throughout the book, Leila discusses the unique predicament of Black goths, who face a kind of double marginalization for choosing an outsider subculture after already being outcast for the color of their skin. In addition, the goth subculture is often viewed (by many outside it and a few ignorant souls within it) as something for white people, and Leila addresses the implication that it somehow makes her “less Black” to be interested in goth. Lastly, the connection between Black history and the Gothic is one that involves violence, death, exploitation, and erasure. Given all of this, what is it about goth that still makes it appealing? In Leila’s words, “the gothic metabolizes historic trauma into art.” Goth subculture and the Gothic provide tools for processing trauma, anxieties, and fears, “molding [them] into something not just manageable, but pleasurable.” This appeal is universal, but arguably it is the marginalized members of our society who need it the most. It is no wonder that those who have been othered may want to revel in their Otherness, to play with monsters, and to find beauty in the darkness.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in either the Gothic or the goth subculture. You can find it on shelves at your local retailer, or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process by clicking on this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Once you read it, be sure to let me know what you think in the comments! Also, if you’re in the New York City area, Leila Taylor and M. Lamar (one of the music artists discussed in the book) will being doing an event at the McNally Jackson bookstore in Brooklyn on Wednesday, November 20. Hope to see you there!