Call For Proposals:
Gothic Blackness: Exploring Ethnogothic, New Black Gothic, and Afro-Gothic Themes in Literature, Film, and Culture
Special Issue of American Gothic Studies
Guest Editor: Dr. DeAnna Daniels, University of Arizona
Proposals due August 15, 2025, with accepted essays due Feb. 1st, 2026
Proposals are solicited for a special issue of American Gothic Studies, the peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by the Society for the Study of the American Gothic in conjunction with Penn State University Press.
This special issue will explore how Blackness haunts, reconfigures, and energizes the Gothic tradition. It seeks to showcase work that engages with and extends subgenres such as the Ethnogothic, Afro-Gothic, and New Black Gothic—terms increasingly used to describe cultural texts that foreground racial, ethnic, ecological, and diasporic experience in speculative and horror aesthetics. Drawing on the work of scholars including Sheri-Marie Harrison, Maisha Wester, and John Jennings, this issue explores how the Gothic becomes a site for confronting the legacies of slavery, colonialism, environmental extraction, and systemic violence, while also opening space for imaginative resistance, survival, and speculative liberation.
We welcome proposals for essays that explore topics including (but not limited to):
Themes:
- The Ethnogothic: How does gothic literature intersect with ethnic histories, cultural trauma, and racialized horror? How do marginalized voices reclaim the gothic tradition to explore themes of displacement, oppression, and survival? How do nonwhite and diasporic communities appropriate or resist Gothic tropes to confront historical and ongoing violence?
- The Ecogothic and Race: How do narratives reflect environmental degradation and racialized displacement? In what ways do ecological Gothic stories entwine race, land, and nature as sites of haunting and survival? How does eco-gothic literature reflect on both personal and collective experiences of ecological loss and crisis?
- Afro-Gothic Forms: How is the Gothic redeployed in Black cultural productions to reimagine history, futurity, and the supernatural? What makes the Afro-Gothic distinct in form, tone, or political urgency? What defines Afro-Gothic as a subgenre?
- Hauntology and Racial Memory: How do ghosts, hauntings, and spectral presences embody and reimagine the traumas of racialized violence, grief, and cultural loss?
- The Speculative and the New Black Gothic: How do contemporary Black writers, artists, and filmmakers use horror and the uncanny to resist, reframe, or rupture dominant narratives?
- Religion, Ritual, the Occult, and the Gothic: How does African diasporic religion, spirituality, or occult practice surface in Black Gothic explorations? What is sacred or profane in the haunted terrain of race?
Suggested Texts and Creators (Literature, Film, Visual Culture):
We welcome proposals for essays that analyze works from both classic and contemporary writers who explore the intersections of race and gothic literature, such as:
- Toni Morrison, Beloved, Home – ghost stories of slavery and Black maternal haunting
- Octavia Butler, Kindred, Fledgling – time travel, vampirism, and gothic kinship
- Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring, The Salt Roads – Afro-Caribbean hauntings and folk horror
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man – racial invisibility as Gothic estrangement
- Tananarive Due, The Between, The Reformatory – speculative history and racial horror
- Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland, An Unkindness of Ghosts – haunted fugitivity and bodily transformation
- Jordan Peele, Get Out, Us, Nope – horror cinema and Black political allegory
- Ryan Coogler, Sinners—Vampires, The Blues, and Gothic Consumption
- Mariama Diallo, Master – academia and Gothic racial surveillance
- Nikyatu Jitsu, Nanny – African religion, diaspora, and supernatural loss
- Jewelle Gomez, The Gilda Stories – queer vampirism and the Black feminist undead
- John Jennings, Blue Hand Mojo: Hard Times Road, Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation – Black speculative visual culture
Potential lines of Inquiry:
- Gothic Representations of Enslaved Bodies and Plantation Landscapes
- Ethnogothic and Diasporic Storytelling
- Monstrosity and Race/Gothic Monsters
- Afrofuturism/Afropessimism and Gothic Blackness
- Racial Melancholia, Grief, and Resistance
- Ecogothic Approaches to Race and the Anthropocene
- Folk horror, Occult Practices, and Religious Horror
- Hauntology and Racial Trauma
- Bodies as Property: The Capitalization of Blackness
- Queer Horror and Intersectional Identities
- Eco-Gothic Imaginaries and Black Geographies
- Necropolitics, the Undead, and States of Exception
- Ethnogothic Mythmaking and Oral Tradition
- Horror as Historical Methodology
- Disability, Deformity, and Monstrosity
- Diseased Bodies and Contagion
- Genocide, Mass Slaughter, and Racialized Killing
Submissions that explore comparative, cross-cultural, and transnational approaches to the American Gothic are also welcome.
Submission Guidelines:
Please submit a 250-300 word abstract and a short bio by August 15, 2025, to Dr. DeAnna Daniels at dd*******@*****na.edu with the subject line: American Gothic Studies Submission – [Your Last Name].
Accepted essays will be due February 1st, 2026; they should be 6000 words and conform to MLA formatting.
American Gothic Studies is the official journal of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic (SSAG), which promotes and advances the study of the American Gothic through research, teaching, and publication. It is the goal of the Society to strengthen relations among persons and institutions both in the United States and internationally who are undertaking such studies, and to broaden knowledge among the general public about the American Gothic in its many forms. Information about SSAG is available at http://www.
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