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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5169-555X
AccessType
Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Afro-American Studies
Year Degree Awarded
2020
Month Degree Awarded
May
First Advisor
James Smethurst
Second Advisor
Steven Tracy
Third Advisor
Britt Rusert
Fourth Advisor
Elizabeth Young
Subject Categories
African American Studies | Africana Studies | American Literature | Literature in English, North America | Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority | Other American Studies
Abstract
Although historically placed in binary opposition, the Double within the African American Gothic connects whiteness to Blackness not just as foils, but as uncanny Doubles connected by abject, and psychological manifestations. The Eurocentric Gothic and the African American Gothic handle race in purposeful and distinct ways. While dealing with themes that are similar to the African American Gothic, such as battles of morality, oppression, and tyrannical patriarchs, the Eurocentric Gothic reinforces racist stereotypes and reduces Black pain to just another trope. Meanwhile, writing within a Eurocentric genre that reinforces racial binaries, African American authors transpose the Gothic idea of race with the use of the Double to blur racial binaries. By blurring the binary, African American authors evaluate Black double consciousness while examining the perception of the fragmented white mind. The blurred binary demonstrates that whiteness is dependent upon Blackness for its existence. By transposing race with the use of the Gothic double, the African American Gothic reveals that the white oppressor is the true monster and definitions of Blackness (created by white sociological constructions of race) function as projections of a monstrous Self onto the Other. The transpositions of these projections demonstrate that whiteness is not free from race because it is dependent upon definitions of Blackness to purify illusions of white supremacy. The African American Gothic Double evaluates these transposed racial binaries and concepts of twoness that exist within the African American Gothic to demonstrate that the Gothic idea of race is a side effect of the moral apathy that exists in the white imagination.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/16675988
Recommended Citation
Senquiz, Kourtney, "The African American Gothic Double" (2020). Doctoral Dissertations. 1888.
https://doi.org/10.7275/16675988
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1888
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License