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What is the Gothic? | Key Elements of Gothic Literature & Film

As Nick Groom notes in The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction, “Type ‘Gothic’ into Google and you get over 250 million hits: images of ecclesiastical architecture, websites devoted to ‘bone-chilling’ literature, and opportunities to purchase alternative footwear….Trying to identify the original ‘Goths’, meanwhile, can lead either to an ancient barbarian race or to a rock music subculture of the 1980s” (2012). All these things are, in fact, gothic, a term with a varied yet related collection of meanings.

“Gothic” originally referenced tribes (Visigoths in the west, Ostrogoths in the east) most famous for invading Rome. The rise of the Goths is often considered the beginning of the “Dark Ages,” a misleading term for the period between the “fall” of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. Stereotyped as a time of intellectual decline, the reality of the early Middle Ages was more complex. In fact, the Visigoths developed a code of law with comparatively progressive attitudes toward the rights of women and the practice of religion.

As Christianity spread across medieval Europe, cathedrals appeared across the continent in a style that sought to capture the magnificence of God for an illiterate public. This ornate, dramatic, and asymmetrical style of art and architecture, seen in the famous Notre Dame de Paris, was distinct from the symmetrical, ordered classical style exemplified by the Roman Pantheon. As the Renaissance aimed to revive classical ideals, Gothic acquired a new meaning: Giorgio Vasari deemed medieval architecture “Gothic,” meaning to debase the style as un-Roman and un-Enlightened. The name stuck, without its necessarily pejorative connotation. 

In The Gothic Cathedral, Otto Georg Von Simson writes that the defining features of Gothic architecture are not its feats of engineering — vaulted ceilings, pointed arches, flying buttresses — or its soaring height, but its “two aspects…without precedent and parallel: the use of light and the unique relationship between structure and appearance” (2020, [1989]). Through light and space, architects aimed, Von Simpson argues, to reflect God in stone:

The Gothic Cathedral

The cathedral was the house of God, this term understood not as a pale commonplace but as fearful reality. The Middle Ages lived in the presence of the supernatural, which impressed itself upon every aspect of human life. The sanctuary was the threshold to heaven. (1989, [2020])

Yet, there was a dark side to Gothic architecture in its shadowy corridors, depictions of hellish torment, and monstrous gargoyles leering overhead. The violence of the Reformation added another layer of less-than-heavenly associations with Gothic architecture: iconoclasts left Europe’s religious structures in ruins and the remains of Gothic architecture haunted.

In the 17th- and early 18th-centuries Gothicism was again transformed: the Goths were reimagined as forerunners to modern society, early Christians who stood against the excesses of paganism and provided an example for curtailing absolutist monarchies. Gothic ruins became popular sites to visit for poetic inspiration or historical reflection. Cultural fascination with medieval customs and architecture helped spark the Gothic literary tradition that emerged in the 1760s.

A naïve young woman finds herself in a vast and mysterious house, filled with unsavory secrets. A guilt-ridden monk is tormented by visions of past wrongs — are they dreams or spectres? A scientist labors in a candlelit laboratory as rain pounds against the window. These are recognizably gothic scenes. But what makes them so?

The Gothic is, in many ways, a formula, a collection of plot devices, character types, and other tropes that can be rearranged and subverted to tell a story — and incorporated into works of any genre.

Let's take a look at some key gothic elements and tropes.

Since Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), authors have loved setting gothic stories in scary structures — castles, monasteries, cathedrals, and houses. Gothic spaces are often labyrinthine or difficult to navigate, containing secret passageways, shadowy corners, crumbling walls, forbidden rooms, and dramatic architectural features (staircases, towers, dungeons, crypts). Glance through the horror movies released in any given year, and you’ll soon notice that many stage their terrors in a single prominent location — whether that structure is haunted by undead presences (The Amityville Horror), terrorized by man-made horrors (Psycho, Get Out), or home to both (The Shining). 

The Gothic also frequents settings which are sublime. Edmund Burke uses sublime to describe intense feelings of pain and danger which can be pleasurable to us “at certain distances, and with certain modifications.” Sublime landscapes often force us to confront our smallness in the face of nature — high mountains, frozen tundras, deep oceans.

“It was a dark and stormy night….” Or, as Mary Shelley writes in Frankenstein (1818), “It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.” The mood of the Gothic translates into its literal gloomy atmosphere, rife with rain, lightning, mist, wind, and fog. The cold, damp, and dark obscure the sun during the day, while pale moonlight lights the gothic night. 

Take this passage from Jane Eyre (1847), when Jane is wandering alone after leaving Mr. Rochester,

Jane Eyre

I lay still a while: the night-wind swept over the hill and over me, and died moaning in the distance; the rain fell fast, wetting me afresh to the skin. Could I but have stiffened to the still frost — the friendly numbness of death — it might have pelted on: I should not have felt it; but my yet living flesh shuddered to its chilling influence.

Here, the weather both reflects and creates the genre’s characteristic melancholy.

Gothic literature has spawned all sorts of nightmarish beings — vampires, werewolves, zombies, demons. These monsters come from nature (Godzilla), from the past (Dracula), from our own creation (Frankenstein’s creature), or from within (Dr. Jekyll’s evil counterpart, Mr. Hyde). Monsters are transgressors, refusing to play by the rules as they prey upon our fears and our desires. (See our study guide on monster theory for more.) 

Some works of Gothic literature feature a literal monster, while others depict humans who behave monstrously, including sadists, serial killers, and sexual predators. Gothic monsters help us interrogate the boundaries between human and nonhuman, acceptability and depravity, goodness, and evil.

Things just don’t seem to stay dead in the Gothic. Ghosts haunt the genre, terrifying characters, possessing them, or warning them of danger. The genre explores the boundary between life and death through beings that transcend them, and ghosts also allow the Gothic to emphasize that particular feeling that won’t let the past rest: guilt. 

The past always seems to return in the Gothic; wrongs demand to be righted, unsated figures seek revenge, and traumatic events resurface. These ghosts may not be literal, but they are felt: for example, in Daphne Du Maurier’s Gothic romance, Rebecca (1938), the protagonist is tormented by comparisons between her and her husband’s late wife, Rebecca. The narrator feels Rebecca’s presence throughout the house and must deal with the consequences of her (and her husband’s) past actions. Even objects in the Gothic seem to have lives of their own; doors mysteriously slam shut and portraits watch from the walls.

Strange families are common in Gothic literature. Characters are haunted by the loss of significant family members or by wrongdoings which continue to curse the family line. Complex family trees allow for reveals of unknown relatives and inheritances. The Gothic wonders how much your family dictates who you are and how difficult it is to break from familial expectations. 

Incest is also a common gothic trope. In Gothic Incest: Gender, Sexuality and Trangression, Jenny DiPlacidi argues that,

Gothic incest: Gender, Sexuality and Transgression

representations of incest are revealed as synonymous with the Gothic as a whole: complex, multifaceted and consciously resistant to the dominant social and sexual hegemonies in their models of alternative agencies, sexualities, forms of desire and family structures. (2018)

The Gothic loves damsels in distress: women in danger, pursued or held captive by monsters and monstrous men who threaten them with physical violence and sexual transgression. These gothic heroines — beautiful, waifish, fragile — swoon and shriek in terror. 

Henry Fusili’s painting The Nightmare captures the dramatic distress of the gothic heroine. A beautiful woman lies with a demon crouched on her torso. Her white dress hugs her body, and her long neck invites a kiss or a monster’s bite. The painting’s combination of horrific and seductive elements exemplifies the impulse to see beauty alongside and within pain, fear, and death.

While gothic heroines may seem helpless and naïve, they often need to be clever and resourceful in order to save themselves. In Dracula (1897), Mina Harker is not just the vampire’s victim; she plays an integral role in defeating him, drawing upon her knowledge of the train tables and battling Dracula alongside the men.

Male gothic protagonists are conflicted, solitary, tortured, brooding, and secretive. The “Byronic hero” — modeled after famous poet and infamous womanizer Lord Byron — rides the line between hero and villain, sometimes a darkly seductive charmer, sometimes a cold and sullen loner. The mercurial Mr. Rochester manipulates Jane even as he is tormented by his secret past; the melancholy Victor Frankenstein alternates between self-aggrandizing and self-loathing, racked with guilt from his actions and inaction.

Another version of this tortured type is the sympathetic monster — Frankenstein’s creature, the Phantom of the Opera, Edward Scissorhands. Rather than clinging to power while brooding on their bad actions, these figures are usually disempowered and tortured by their own existence more than anything they’ve done.

The heroine slowly walks down the hallway. Tense string music plays in the background, and she tightens her grip on the weapon in her hand as she moves in and out of shadow. The music swells, and you hold your breath as you wait for something to happen.  

This feeling of tension and suspense is core to the gothic aesthetic. The genre plays with psychological intensity and anticipation as much as it releases into outbursts of violence.

The Gothic also embraces melodrama. Dramatic events occur and characters respond in kind — women swoon, men rage and lash out. Inner torment is expressed in displays of “madness,” and characters become physically ill as a result of moral failure, psychological distress, or bad weather. 

Doubling is another common trope in the Gothic. Some stories, like Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), feature doppelgangers, people who look exactly alike. But gothic doubles can take other forms too — twins, reflections, separate characters who begin to merge into one. In Carmilla (1847), Laura and Carmilla grow more alike and codependent: “you and I are one for ever,” Carmilla declares.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Dorian’s double is his decaying portrait which allows him to remain forever young. This doubling, as with Jekyll and Hyde, allows for an examination of the duplicity of man and the difference between appearances and true nature. 

In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley writes about her inspiration for the novel,

Frankenstein

When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. (1831)

The book came to Shelley in a dream, fitting for a story which features powerful dreams of its own. Sleep is often disrupted in Gothic texts by visions and nightmares which reveal desires, fears, or dangers.

The Gothic is more than the sum of its parts: it is invested in particular themes which can be adapted to different times, locations, and political agendas. Broadly, the Gothic depicts transgressions, both of behavioral norms (sexual deviance, gender subversion, moral wrongdoings) and of seemingly fixed boundaries (self and other, life and death, past and present, man and monster). Dwelling often in the spaces between these categories, the Gothic often aims to evoke an ambivalent feeling of pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion. Fear, the popularity of the Gothic seems to say, can feel pretty good. 

Theoretical concepts often helpful for analyzing Gothic texts include the unheimlich/uncanny (Freud), the abject (Kristeva), the grotesque, the liminal, the monstrous, the sublime (Burke), the fantastic (Todorov; Rabkin), the weird (Fisher), and the eerie (Fisher).

The Gothic novel pushes back against the Enlightenment’s view of the world as rational, disenchanted, and comprehensible through human experimentation and exploration. As William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith write in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic,

The Encyclopedia of the Gothic

The Gothic pursues a seemingly messier version of what it means to be a person than that articulated in early natural philosophies and suggests that the world is a more complex place than Enlightenment science would have us believe. However, this is, of course, a simplification. The Gothic represents an attempt not to destroy coherence but to provide an alternative context within which meaning is discussed. The Gothic is thus founded on a model idea of debate and interrogation and functions as a form of radical skepticism that, paradoxically, seems to echo the Enlightenment emphasis on interrogation and testing as a way of getting at some semblance of the truth.

Some of the earliest criticism on gothic aesthetics was produced by the prolific Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe. Building on Edmund Burke’s work, Radcliffe defined “terror” and “horror,” drawing a distinction between them — and the two emerging strains of Gothic novel. In the posthumously published essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826), she writes that terror and horror are “so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them” (1826). 

Radcliffe champions terror, arguing that terror relies on an obscured or anticipated fear, something felt rather than faced, whereas horror results from the shock and awe of confronting something ghastly. Terror is evoked when the image is “not distinctly pictured forth, but is seen in glimpses through obscuring shades, the great outlines only appearing, which excite the imagination to complete the rest…. Obscurity leaves something for the imagination to exaggerate” (1826). This distinction between terror and horror remains a method for analyzing the Gothic and continues to be reinterpreted by scholars. (See Locating Ann Radcliffe for more on Radcliffe’s writing and aesthetics.)

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) is traditionally considered the first Gothic novel, in part because Walpole added the subtitle “A Gothic Story” to its second edition. Originally presented as a translation of a lost 16th-century manuscript, the novel takes place in a medieval Italian castle, reflecting the period’s fascination with a mysterious and romanticized gothic past. Otranto established many elements that became characteristic of the Gothic: elaborate and eerie architecture, a gloomy atmosphere, a vengeful past, seemingly supernatural events, religious imagery, disguised identities, and — of course — the dead and undead. As Annie Pécastaings writes in her introduction to Otranto, “The character types who inhabit Otranto’s landscape have become staples of the Gothic novel: Isabella (Frederic’s daughter) is the novel’s maiden in distress, Manfred its lustful villain, and Father Jerome its mysterious holy monk” (2009).

In the decades following the publication of Otranto, the Gothic novel flourished in books like William Beckford’s licentious, Orientalist tale, Vathek (1786); Matthew Lewis’ moralist romance The Monk (1796); Ann Radcliffe’s popular, pioneering novels including The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797); and Mary Shelley’s masterpiece and progenitor of science fiction, Frankenstein (1818).

By 1803, the Gothic novel had become so popular and recognizable that Jane Austen completed wrote a parody of the genre, Northanger Abbey (although the novel was not published until 1817). Charles Maturin’s meandering Melmouth, The Wander (1820) was once considered the bookend to the period of the proper Gothic novel, but this strict periodization quickly falls apart. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and her sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847) contain many gothic elements, and some of the Gothic’s most famous creations arise much later in the century— J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). While these later works were once considered revivals of an earlier mode or simply not Gothic, Gothic criticism now tracks a longer tradition across several cross-pollinating periods of development. 

In the Victorian era, Gothic subgenres like the detective story, ghost story, and adventure story took shape, along with urban Gothic stories of London and the “suburban Gothic” of sensation fiction. Jarlath Killeen writes in History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825–1914: 

History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825-1914

Just as the development of urban Gothic shows how modernity is considered to produce horrors of its own not reducible to the anachronistic or to history, so the suburban thrills of Sensation Fiction demonstrate categorically that, far from bringing enlightenment, modernity produces monsters. (2009)

Toward the fin de siècle and early twentieth century, the Gothic became a useful mode for addressing fears arising from a modernizing, secularizing, overextended British empire. (See our study guide on the fin de siècle for more on this period.)

The twentieth century provided plenty of new fears for the Gothic to tap into. In History of the Gothic: Twentieth-Century Gothic, Lucie Armitt writes that the “real-life horror of two world wars takes over from the imagined horrors of the supernatural and/or superstition” (2011). Threats of nuclear war, serial killers, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic sparked their own gothic interpretations, and the haunted house, an element of the Gothic since Walpole’s castle, rose to particular prominence, whether representing the destruction of war in Europe or American suburbia. Armitt argues that the twentieth century oriented the Gothic toward “threats we believe face our children,” evidenced by “the monster narratives the media constructs around ‘the paedophile’, ‘the child abductor’, ‘the child murderer’, ‘the child abuser’” (2011). 

The development of cinema brought Gothic to the silver screen; the 1930s and 1940s created a group of classic monsters — Boris Karloff as the creature in Frankenstein (1931), Bela Lugosi as the titular Dracula (1931), Henry Hull as a Werewolf of London (1935) — and, over the course of the century, Alfred Hitchock pioneered the visual Gothic. The 1960s through 1980s welcomed a proliferation of horror films and franchises, while more recently the Gothic has been shaped by the paranormal romance craze from Ann Rice to Stephanie Meyer.

As the Gothic expands, so does its definition and the scholarship around it. Armitt writes:

History of the Gothic: Twentieth-Century Gothic

Unlike the origins of Gothic, which clustered around a specific, but small, group of writers, thinkers and painters…, twentieth-century reignition of interest in the contemporary Gothic has us reeling in terms of how best to tame this amorphous and ever-expanding ‘monster’. (2011)

The Gothic tradition is still alive and well, and it reaches far beyond the traditional novel, if it was ever confined there in the first place. Samuel Coleridge’s poem “Christabel” (1816), Richard Brinsley Peake’s play Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (1823), and Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry and short stories infuse non-novelistic forms with gothic tropes and themes. Today, the Gothic can be found in video games and tv shows, music and graphic novels. In addition to growing literature on Gothic subgenres — Rural Gothic, New Urban Gothic, Postfeminist Gothic —  there is increasing scholarship on regional Gothic traditions across the globe — Nordic Gothic, Irish Gothic, Australian Gothic, South Asian Gothic, South African Gothic. While the Gothic relies on recognizable conventions, it endlessly adapts to new locations, mediums, and monsters.

Like “Gothic,” “horror” as a genre signifier is difficult to define. While “horror” may at first bring to mind popular film franchises like Halloween and Scream, Darryl Jones points out that horror is not necessarily modern or low brow (2021). He argues that tragedy is highbrow horror; images from Sophocles and Euripides (Oedipus gouging out his own eyes, Pentheus’ mother tearing her son apart, Medea murdering her children) would be right at home in the latest splatter film.

While horror and the Gothic are certainly related — today’s horror literature can be traced back to the Gothic novel — the exact relationship between Gothic and horror as genres is contested. Jones files horror under the umbrella of the Gothic; whereas other kinds of Gothic texts can prioritize “terror” (as Radcliffe defined it), fears that remain obscured, imagined, or psychological, “horror” is a specific mode of the Gothic invested in, well, horror — in bodily/corporeal fear and revulsion. 

In Haunted Seasons, Derek Johnston takes the inverse approach, seeing the Gothic as a subgenre of horror — though defining these terms is especially difficult given that the label “Gothic” is so often applied by scholars after the fact rather than arising in original discourses around the texts. Johnston writes,

Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween

As a genre, horror is one that is regularly left undefined, presumably with the assumption that people know it when they see it…. The Gothic, on the other hand, is subject to many definitions, even when simply considering literary and media Gothic rather than, say, the architectural, the musical, or the subcultural. (2015)

In film criticism, the distinction between terror and horror can be helpful for categorizing films as Gothic or horror, categories that may borrow from each other but are ultimately separate — the subtle and suggestive Gothic hinting at partially visible terrors, dwelling in shadows, psychological manifestations, and hauntings. Horror, on the other hand, is often seen as heavily graphic and explicit, employing (often gratuitous) gore and violence. 

As helpful as this division can be, Xavier Aldana Reyes writes in Gothic Cinema that “the alignment of the cinematic Gothic with the horrifically acceptable or less extreme runs the risk of stigmatising more transgressive films and of denying horror (as it is understood in this taxonomy) its own potential value as more than a collection of gruesome moments” (2019). Moreover, not all non-visceral horror films are Gothic: Reyes cites Alien (1979), which “does not rely on particularly visceral numbers to generate its scares and its monster stays out of focus for most of the film” but can be “described as science fiction horror” or else risk stretching the Gothic until it loses meaning (2019). Conversely, horror has no monopoly on blood, sex, and violence; the Gothic, too, can be graphic. 

The case study below details how the Gothic and horror operate alongside one another in cinema, combining “terror” and “horror” to craft a thrilling film.

Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 film Crimson Peak engages with the Gothic tradition, both celebrating and subverting the genre while incorporating elements of horror. The film is self-aware in its deployment of gothic tropes; its title card is the cover of a book, which opens to let the viewer inside, intentionally locating the film as part of a literary lineage. 

Crimson Peak follows the American heiress Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) as she marries the mysterious English baronet Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and moves to his English estate, Allerdale Hall — nicknamed “Crimson Peak” because of the warm red clay which seeps up through the snow in winter.

The film borrows its core elements from the Gothic romance (think Rebecca [1938] and its predecessor, Jane Eyre [1847]) — a young woman suddenly attached to a man she doesn’t really know, a gloomy manor house with forbidden rooms, a cold and hostile housekeeper  the haunting presence (literal or metaphorical) of a past wife (or wives), an investigation into the man’s secrets. Crimson Peak mirrors themes of early Gothic novels by featuring familial strife, sexual transgression (including incest), and a young woman preyed upon for her money; it also draws upon the Victorian Gothic, incorporating a detective story and modernizing technology (Thomas’s clay mining machine, wax phonographic cylinders, glass plate photography). 

The gothic decadence of Crimson Peak — the heroine walking slowly through the halls of a crumbling mansion with a candelabra in hand, her white nightgown trailing behind her and a ghostly portent ringing in her ears — is punctuated by bloody moments of horror.

The above scene begins firmly in the realm of the Gothic: Edith dreams of wandering  sparse moorland , and a ghostly figure points in the direction she should go. Edith awakens and coughs, leaving a red stain on her white pillowcase and pale fingertips (the contrast of colors is a gothic element particularly well-suited to film). Standing as she senses an otherworldly presence, she raises the candelabra to light the dim room and extends her hand, inviting the ghost to touch her. A shadow moves across the background, momentary and incorporeal. Her breath comes heavy and her eyes dart around as the scene builds its tension. Suddenly, Edith’s hand is pulled to the floor by an unseen force, and someone screams in the bathroom. The threats are sensed but still not clearly seen. Edith’s face is cast in shadow and  her body is framed by the crack in the door as we watch her slowly move through it and into the bathroom. There, she finds a ghost resting in the bathtub, a meat cleaver lodged in its skull. This image is one of horror: the massive weapon, the deformed body, the bloody red. Edith runs into the hallway and encounters another horrifying specter, the floor below it wet and shining with blood, its bones crunching as it lurches toward her.

Crimson Peak employs elements of the Gothic and horror to craft a film both suspenseful and visceral. Xavier Aldana Reyes notes that,

Gothic Cinema

one of Crimson Peak’s distinguishing features is its clay-red ghosts, halfway between the ethereal and the gory, and the aggressive nature of scenes like the face-stabbing of Thomas. (2019)

Its particularly violent ending delivers the viscerality of horror within the Gothic aesthetic, the white snow stained red with clay and blood. The film plays with shadow, color, and framing, honoring a history of Gothic aesthetics on screen whilst taking them in new directions. Through Crimson Peak, we see how the Gothic and horror are intertwined and how tropes of both can be continuously combined, reorganized, and subverted to tell compelling and frightening stories on page and screen alike.   

One method of analyzing and categorizing Gothic literature is by separating it into two traditions, “male” and “female” Gothic, often represented by the respective writings of Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe. This division in part aligns with the distinction Radcliffe offered between horror and terror — the male Gothic tending toward shocking sights, the female Gothic preferring obscured or anticipated fears.

The distinction between male and female Gothic is also a difference in perspective: the male Gothic inhabits the psychology of the villain, or at least a flawed and tortured leading figure, while the female Gothic (first coined by Ellen Moers) focuses its lens on the persecuted protagonist — often a young woman — and the domestic space she risks entrapment within.

As Carol Davison writes in History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764–1824, the male Gothic subverted Enlightenment ideals and patriarchal institutions through scenes of horrific depravity and interruptions of the supernatural, while the female Gothic “often rendered the violation of such ideals in veiled, sexualized terms, in keeping with the nature of the threats experienced by women” — threats that were not supernatural but manmade (2009). The female Gothic’s proclivity for disturbed domestic spaces contains a critique of the institutions women writers found themselves disregarded by and incarcerated within. Davison writes, “The Female Gothic castle/house … mirrors woman’s ‘ambivalent experience of entrapment and longing for protection’ within these institutions” (2009).

While meaningful scholarship has arisen out of an interest in the female Gothic, the term is a contested one. Is the female Gothic necessarily feminist, or is “feminist Gothic” another subgenre? Is the female Gothic necessarily by or about women? What about women who write Gothic stories that mainly feature men, or feature women in ways that do not resemble the typical “female Gothic” — and men who writes stories that do? Does the term emphasize the ways that women’s writers use the Gothic to highlight their particular experiences and concerns, or does it risk gender essentializing and implying that women can only write Gothic stories about domestic fears? 

In The Female Gothic: New Directions, Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith interrogate the term for the 21st-century, addressing how the female Gothic is shaped by, challenges, and complicates issues of national identity, sexuality, language, race, and history. As new writers “transform and renew the form,” they write:

The Female Gothic: New Directions

we need to retain a sense of history, of the line which runs from even further back than Radcliffe …  down to Toni Morrison and to the new ‘postfeminist Gothic’ of Buffy and her peers. Retaining the term ‘Female Gothic’ as a broad and fluid category – while both interrogating it and acknowledging its many mutations (feminist Gothic, lesbian Gothic, comic Gothic, postfeminist Gothic) – is one way of doing this. (2009)

Gothic politics: conservative or radical? 

Although the Gothic persistently explores what happens when boundaries are transgressed, it is not necessarily transgressive as a genre. The Gothic can deliver messages both conservative and progressive, oppressive and liberatory. At once, the genre allows the writer and reader to indulge in “deviant” desires while often condemning, or, at least, containing, them. 

J. Sheridan Le Fanu spends most of Carmilla (1872) exploring Laura’s simultaneous feelings of attraction and repulsion toward the alluring Carmilla. The author permits the reader to experience an otherwise unacceptable homoerotic connection between two young women. Of course, the “threat” must eventually be expelled: Carmilla is killed, heteronormativity reasserted as the rightful norm. But the book, like many Gothic texts, is ambivalent: Laura remains infatuated with Carmilla even after her death.

Gothic villains, particularly those of the supernatural variety, are often threats to the normative institutions. Dracula is an outsider, a foreigner from “the East”, who threatens the establishment and promises to proliferate until Protestant England has been overrun with his kind. Stoker’s text is rife with racist, antisemitic, and anti-Catholic tropes, and Dracula bristles Victorian norms with his seductive power, polygamy, and gender transgression. He is a composite representation of the fears faced by the British Empire at the fin de siècle.

Yet, in its aim to depict the transgressive, hidden, and repressed, the Gothic has always held radical potential. Early gothic villains included people in positions of power, such as hypocritical clergymen or violent family patriarchs, inviting critique of the institutions they represented. Modern writers like Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Jewelle Gomez, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Wintersson, Carmen Maria Machado, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Stephen Graham Jones embrace the possibilities of the Gothic to tell complex stories that resist hegemonic narratives. 

Disabled artist Riva Lehrer in Golem Girl: A Memoir and trans theorist Susan Stryker in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” identify with Frankenstein’s creature, reframing conversations from the point of view of the “monster.” In response to transphobic comments, Stryker says:

The Transgender Studies Reader Remix

When such beings as these tell me I war with nature, I find no more reason to mourn my opposition to them—or to the order they claim to represent—than Frankenstein’s monster felt in its enmity to the human race. I do not fall from the grace of their company—I roar gleefully away from it like a Harley-straddling, dildo-packing leatherdyke from hell. (2022)

While the Gothic can condemn the monstrous, the transgressive, the inexplicable, it can also echo Stryker’s words: “I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself” (2022).

Additional Gothic literature & film resources on Perlego

Key Concepts in the Gothic by William Hughes

The Routledge Companion to the Gothic, edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy

Queer Others in Gothic Fiction: Transgressing Monstrosity by Ardel Haefele-Thomas

Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic by Sarah Gilbreath Ford

Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic by Catherine Spooner

Amitt, L. (2011). History of the Gothic: Twentieth-Century Gothic. University of Wales Press. 

Austen, J. (1817; 2009). Northanger Abbey. Barnes & Noble.

Burke, E. (1757; 2009). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. Routledge.

Davison, C. (2009). History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764–1824. University of Wales Press.

Groce, J. (2014). An Introduction to Gothic Architecture. University Press.

Groom, N. (2015). The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Hughes, W., Punter, D., & Smith A. (2015). The Encyclopedia of the Gothic. Wiley-Blackwell.

History.com editors. “Goths and Visigoths.” History.com, 2019. Available at: https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-rome/goths-and-visigoths 

Johnston, D. (2015). Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween. Palgrave Macmillan.

Jones, D. (2021). Horror: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Killeen, J. (2009). History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825–1914. University of Wales Press.

Le Fanu, J.S. (1872; 2013). Carmilla, ed. Costello-Sullivan, K. Syracuse University Press. 

Lloyd-Smith, A. (2002). American Gothic Fiction. Continuum.

Moers, E. (1978). Literary Women. Women’s Press.

Moscicki, O. “Imagining a ‘gothic disability’: literary genre, political theory, and living disabled in Riva Lehrer’s portraiture,” Disability & Society, 2022.

Radcliffe, A. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” Gothic Digital Series @ UFSC, 2017.

Smith, A. & Bennet, M. (2020). Locating Anne Radcliffe. Routledge.

Stoker, B. (1897; 2012). Dracula. William Collins.

Stryker, S. & Blackston, D.M. (2022). The Transgender Studies Reader Remix. Routledge.

Wallace, D. & Smith, A. (2009). The Female Gothic: New Directions. Palgrave Macmillan.

Walpole, H. (1764; 2009). The Castle of Otranto. Barnes & Noble.

Key Elements of Gothic Literature & Film

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Afrofuturism | Definition, Examples & Analysis

You are watching the movie Black Panther (Coogler, 2018). As Fulani singer Baaba Maal vocalizes, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), and Okoye (Danai Gurira) fly their advanced aircraft, the Talon Fighter, low over rural Africa, dotted with galloping animals and waving shepherds. The Fighter soars toward a mountainside which suddenly diffuses into blue energy as the craft moves through a forcefield-like barrier. The music swells, and a gleaming city appears. This is Birnin Zana, the Golden City. This is Wakanda. This is Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism imagines possible futures through a Black cultural lens. Mark Dery coined the term in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. In “Black to the Future,” a chapter featuring interviews with writers/cultural critics Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose, Dery writes, 

Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture

Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and address African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture — and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future — might, for want of a better term, be called “Afrofuturism". (1994) 

Although Dery was writing in the 1990s in response to Black American science fiction, Afrofuturism was soon understood as a broader movement, stretching back decades and beyond the realm of literature to embrace other disciplines, technologies, and cultures around the world.

Afrofuturism takes up the radical task of imagining futures for Black life, responding to the question: “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of history, imagine possible futures?” (Dery, 1994). Afrofuturists answer with a resounding yes. 

In envisioning Black futures, Afrofuturism resists the ways that Black people have been historically and systemically denied futures of their own making. The lack of Black and Brown bodies, let alone fully realized Black and Brown characters, in most science fiction is apparent and alarming. Acclaimed sci-fi/fantasy writer N.K. Jemesin addresses this unsettling lack when she describes watching reruns of The Jetsons (1962–1963) as an adult: 

[T]here’s nobody even slightly brown in the Jetsons’ world. Even the family android sounds white. This is supposed to be the real world’s future, right? [...] Thing is, not-white-people make up most of the world’s population, now as well as back in the Sixties when the show was created. So what happened to all those people, in the minds of this show’s creators? [...] I’m watching the Jetsons, and it’s creeping me right the fuck out. (2013)

Afrofuturism provides an alternative to the “unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers — white to a man — who have engineered our collective fantasies” (Dery, 1994). 

As Afrofuturists work to decolonize the future, they also excavate the past. In the words of Tricia Rose, “If you’re going to imagine yourself in the future, you have to imagine where you’ve come from” (Dery, 1994). In reclaiming a lost history or imagining an alternative one, Afrofuturists often incorporate African traditions, imagery, and mythologies.

Ytasha L. Womack summarizes the Afrofuturist mission in Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture:

Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture

Afrofuturists sought to unearth the missing history of people of African descent and their roles in science, technology, and science fiction. They also aimed to reintegrate people of color into the discussion of cyberculture, modern science, technology, and sci-fi pop culture. (2013)

The Afrofuturist movement thus sits at “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation” (Womack, 2013). In Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art, Elizabeth C. Hamilton visually represents Afrofuturism. Designed with visual art in mind, her graph proves useful for understanding a broader Afrofuturist aesthetic and intention: 

Elizabeth C. Hamilton, The Visual Language of Afrofuturism, 2021.

Afrofuturism combines these interests — materiality, temporality, appropriation, transformation, and black liberation (fugitivity) — while it “attends to technology, fantasy, reinterpreted pasts, and visions of the future” (Hamilton, 2022).

Afrofuturism is a cultural movement — an aesthetic, a philosophy, a practice — which constructs an expansively imaginative future while recovering and relying upon the past. Afrofuturist speaker and art curator Ingrid LaFleur describes Afrofuturism as an “intersectional, multi-temporal, multi-dimensional, and interdisciplinary approach to the future” which “empowers Black bodies to craft destinies and realities of inclusion, health, joy, and prosperity using speculative modalities such as science fiction, surrealism, magical realism, and horror.” 

In crafting destinies and realities, Afrofuturism predicts Black life in the future while celebrating Black cultures, technologies, and innovations of the past and present.

While Afrofuturism appears across art forms and disciplines, Dery named the movement in the 1990s in response to science fiction written by Black authors. Sci-fi, at least commercially, had largely been dominated by white, male writers. Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Steve Barnes, and Charles Saunders were leading disrupters of this pattern. These writers populated the future with Black and Brown people (itself a radical act) and harnessed speculative fiction as a staging ground for ideas of Black liberation. 

Afrofuturist efforts to imagine the future are inextricably linked to a history of cultural destruction. Delany says, “The historical reason that we’ve been so impoverished in terms of future images is because, until fairly recently, as a people we were systematically forbidden any images of our past” (Dery, 1994). Slavery sought to eliminate a sense of African social consciousness. Enslaved peoples were forcibly taken from their homelands, refused their language and cultural practices, separated from their peoples and relatives, barred from tools to disseminate histories, and prohibited from building families. 

Speculative fiction, and science fiction in particular, is especially suited to expressing this experience. Dery is one of many scholars to draw a parallel between enslavement and alien abduction: 

African-Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendents of alien abductees; they inhabit a science-fiction nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies. (1994)

Greg Tate argues that science fiction, through stories of people transported from the past to the future or thrust into alien cultures, parallels the sense of alienation experienced by the Black subject in the United States: “Black people live the estrangement that science fiction writers imagine” (Dery, 1994).

Moreover, as Dery contends, “the sublegitimate status of science fiction as a pulp genre in Western literature mirrors the subaltern position” to which Black people have been relegated throughout American history (1994). Delany, Womack, and Scott Bukatman place comics alongside sci-fi proper as another “sublegitimate” art form turned to by Black creators (see, as just one example, the creators and comics of Milestone Media).

Beyond reflecting the reality of lived experiences, speculative fiction enables the imagining of alternative pasts and futures. Afrofuturism pushes the boundaries of what is possible, generating new ways of thinking and being. As Bukatman writes in Black Panther (2022), 

Black Panther

Afrofuturist entertainment is also utopian in its profligate liberatory strategies and energies, its possible futures often predicated (explicitly or not) upon alternative histories, its practitioners repurposing existent culture to their own ends, building and unleashing something new. (2020)

Speculative fiction provides the tools for building a new world, constructing new histories and futures, and shattering impossibilities. Afrofuturism harnesses that power in the name of liberation.

Black utopian thought has a long history, dating back to Martin R. Delany’s political writings on Black nationalism and his fictional dramatization of those ideas in Blake; or the Huts of America (1859) — what Alex Zamalin calls in Black Utopia “the first work of Black fantasy fiction” (2019). As Black utopian thought developed, speculative fiction remained a useful tool for exploring its possibilities. W. E. B. Du Bois’s short story “The Comet” (1920) asked how race would matter after the apocalypse, and his novel Dark Princess (1928) visualized a utopian Global South in which people of color united for collective self-determination (Zamalin, 2019).

Many histories of Afrofuturism begin with Sun Ra, the jazz composer, musician, and poet, who claimed to come from the planet Saturn and made music for the Space Age while dressed as an Egyptian pharaoh. Describing himself as an alien on earth, Sun Ra linked the alienation of Black people in the United States with visions of other planets, looking backward to a history of Black abduction and forward into a galactic future. As Paul Youngquist writes in A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism,

A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism

Sun Ra crossed the inner city with outer space to create music as progressive socially as it was aesthetically. As a response to a world preoccupied with the space race and oblivious to racial injustice, Sun Ra’s music announces not merely a demand for a better world but a program for building one. (2016)

In a concert recorded in 1960, released in 2002 as Music from Tomorrow’s World, Sun Ra asks, “If we are here / Why can’t we be there?” — an Afrofuturist question if there ever was one. 

Although the word Afrofuturism had not yet been uttered, Sun Ra clearly stands as a forefather of the movement. While Elizabeth C. Hamilton acknowledges how crucial Sun Ra’s mythology is to the development of Afrofuturism, she also encourages adopting a wider, and less male-centric, view of Afrofuturism’s origins. Hamilton begins her survey of Afrofuturism in visual art with Harriet Tubman, treating the historical icon as a symbol of the future and prototype of Afrofuturism. Hamilton also examines the nineteenth- and twentieth-century art of Harriet Powers and Alma Thomas as Afrofuturist “narratives of fugitivity that run parallel with their biographical realities” (2022). Hamilton “recenters the founding of Afrofuturism, placing it around black women artists and their cultural production rather than the nearly exclusively credited ‘soulful spaceman’ Sun Ra” (2022). The history and project of Afrofuturism runs deep. 

The immediate heir to Sun Ra’s musical experimentation was astrofunk pioneer George Clinton. Clinton’s collective of musicians, Parliament-Funkadelic (P-Funk) sketched “a musical blueprint for a near future in which blacks turn majority and regulate their lives through the powers and possibilities of funk” (Youngquist, 2016). Youngquist describes the opening track of The Mothership Connection as “alien invasion with a difference” (2016): 

We have taken control as to bring you this special show. We will return it to you as soon as you are grooving. Welcome to radio station WEFUNK, better known as we-funk, or deeper still the Mothership Connection, home of the extraterrestrial brothers, dealers of funky music, P-Funk, uncut funk, the bomb. (Parliament, 1975)

P-Funk reanimates Black life, deploying, in the words of the “Prelude” to Parliament’s Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, “specially designed afronauts capable of funkatizing galaxies” (1976).  

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Afrofuturism gained traction through the prescient works of prolific sci-fi authors like Samuel R. Delany (Trouble on Triton, Hogg) and Octavia Butler (Parable of the Sower, Bloodchild and Other Stories). Comic book creators (like Milestone Media) and visual artists (like Ellen Gallagher) also combined Black lives with technology and visions of the future. 

With the naming of Afrofuturism came efforts to uncover and discuss works within this framework, and it became clear that “there was a tradition of sci-fi or futuristic works created by people of African descent that stretched back to precolonial Africa” (Womack, 2013). As Womack writes, “the world of black sci-fi geeks and comic book fans who felt isolated in their interests and ignored by mainstream sci-fi creators had a virtual home, an aesthetic to give their craft and pastime an academically based validity” (2013). The rise of the internet was essential to the growth of Afrofuturism, enabling creators to share their work and enthusiasts to find community.

Afrofutures have steadily become more visible on big screens. Womack mentions the box-office success of The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski, 1999), which “included a cast of multiethnic characters, the polar opposite of the legacy of homogeneous sci-fi depictions so great that even film critic Roger Ebert questioned whether The Matrix creators envisioned a future world dominated by black people” (2013). Blade (Norrington, 1998) starred Wesley Snipes as a vampire hero, and Denzel Washington played humanity's savior in the postapocalyptic The Book of Eli (Hughes and Hughes, 2010). Will Smith put a “cosmic dent in the monolithic depiction of the sci-fi hero” (Womack, 2013) in films like Independence Day (Scott, 1996), Men in Black (Sonenfeld, 1997), I Am Legend (Lawrence, 2007), and After Earth (Shyamalan, 2013). Recently, more Black creators are driving depictions of varied speculative worlds on small and silver screens — from movies like Get Out (Peele, 2017), Sorry to Bother You (Riley, 2018) and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Coogler, 2022) to TV series like Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country (2020) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred (2022).

Even as science fiction and Afrofuturism gain more mainstream attention, the movement continues to thrive outside the constraints of major companies and corporations thanks to the Internet. In the early days of the Internet, listservs and forums did significant work in spreading the movement, allowing Afrofuturists from across the globe to “tell their stories, share their stories, and connect with audiences inexpensively — a gift from the sci-fi gods” (Womack, 2013). Now, with social media platforms and ever-developing video, art, and gaming technology, those connections are more feasible than ever. As Womack writes, “The storytelling gatekeepers vanished with the high-speed modem, and for the first time in history, people of color have a greater ability to project their own stories” (2013). 

In the next section, we’ll examine two examples of Afrofuturism in contemporary popular culture: the music of Janelle Monáe and the Black Panther movies.

Examples of Afrofuturism: Janelle Monáe’s discography and Black Panther’s Wakanda

Janelle Monáe is perhaps the best known contemporary heir of Afrofuturism’s musical lineage. The pop icon’s discography narrates a sci-fi storyline, evidenced by her titles: Metropolis: The Chase Suite (2008), The ArchAndroid (2010), The Electric Lady (2013), and Dirty Computer (2018). Monáe’s artistry extends beyond her music. Her high-concept videos, liner notes, and Tumblr provide the story around the songs; Dirty Computer was released as an “emotion picture,” a 50-minute narrative film accompanying the album, and Monáe published a short story collection, The Memory Library: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer.

In her albums before Dirty Computer, Monáe took on the persona of Cindi Mayweather, an android programmed with the rare rock-star proficiency package and a working soul. In the year 2719, she lives in Metropolis, a city created as a haven after five world wars decimated the earth, now a hedonistic playground for robo-zillionaires riddled with ethnic, race, and class conflict. When Cindi falls in love with a human, forbidden in Metropolis, she becomes an outlaw and eventually realizes that she is the ArchAndroid — the prophesied cyborg messiah who will unite and liberate Metropolis. As Alyssa Favreau writes in Janelle Monáe’s The ArchAndroid, Monáe draws upon the “legacy of science fiction writers using their stories to imagine alternative futures, better futures” and creates “a world of limitless potential that assures her a place in a musical lineage begun by artists like Sun Ra and George Clinton” (Favreau, 2021). The choice to take on this persona is itself an Afrofuturist move: “By inhabiting Cindi Mayweather, Monáe is able to exist simultaneously as twenty-first-century pop royalty and as the legendary prototype android of that far future” (Favreau, 2021). Echoing the words of Sun Ra, “If we are here / Why can’t we be there?” 

The cover art of The ArchAndroid evokes a classic Afrofuturist aesthetic: futuristic technology with an ancient Egyptian influence. The music video for "Tightrope" stylizes Afrofuturism differently, engaging with recent rather than ancient history. Set in an asylum in which dancing is banned for its potentially magical effects, the video’s aesthetic seems more of the twentieth than twenty-eighth century. Monáe/Cindi, rocking a pompadour and a tuxedo, leads a subversive dance party inspired by the styles of Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, James Brown, Prince, David Bowie, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe:

While Monáe’s earlier albums are set in the twenty-eighth century, Dirty Computer takes place in a near future where people deemed “dirty” are “cleansed” by having their memories forcibly wiped. As the narrative film explains, “You were dirty if you looked different. You were dirty if you refused to live the way they dictated. You were dirty if you showed any form of opposition at all” (Monáe, 2018). Through the speculative worlds surrounding her albums, Monáe explores what it means to find liberation in a hostile world. An openly pansexual, nonbinary Black artist, Monáe fuses her artistry with activism.

Dirty Computer was released in the same year as Black Panther, and Monáe was working on the album in Atlanta while Black Panther was filming nearby. Monáe says, “It just felt like a great, an amazing time for Afrofuturism. [...] For me, Afrofuturism is extremely important because we get to, as black folks in this world, we get to speak through science fiction and magical surrealism. We get to speak about our stories told from our own mouths in the future, and what happens to us” (Kakaire, 2018). 

Black Panther engaged with Afrofuturist aesthetics and ideals before the word was written. When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby first introduced Wakanda in the comic books, they depicted a “man-made jungle” of technological vines, flowers, and boulders. The comics scripted by Christopher Priest and, later, Ta-Nehisi Coates incorporated some Afrofuturist ideas, but Bukatman names the Wakanda envisioned onscreen by director Ryan Coogler, production designer Hannah Beachler, and costume designer Ruth E. Carter “the most compelling and coherent vision to date of an Afrofuturist Wakanda” (2022). Through “deep consideration of the relations of past to present to future,” the creators steeped “their vision in equal measures of history and extrapolation” (Bukatman, 2022). 

Black Panther begins with an alternative history. Millions of years ago, a meteorite containing vibranium — the strongest substance in the universe with extraordinary powers — crashed into Africa. Five tribes eventually settled the area around the meteorite's impact point, calling it Wakanda. The tribes were at war until the Panther goddess Bast led a warrior shaman to the heart-shaped herb, a plant granting him superhuman powers. This warrior became the first Black Panther and king of Wakanda. With the power of vibranium, Wakanda became the most technologically advanced nation in the world, but, if the world knew about Wakanda’s resources, the nation would never see peace. Instead, Wakanda exists secretly in isolation and the Black Panther protects Wakanda from outside threats. During the ceremony to induct the new Black Panther, the heart-shaped herb takes the individual to the ancestral plane, where they usually encounter previous Black Panthers and figures from their past.

The lore of Wakanda is full of Afrofuturist fusions. Ancient history is combined with futuristic technology; Shuri’s attempts to synthetically recreate the heart-shaped herb in Wakanda Forever link religious mysticism and scientific experimentation. The ancestral plane visualizes a form of “ancestor worship,” which Tricia Rose names as a part of Black culture and “countering a historical erasure” (Dery, 1994). Wakanda imagines a resistant counter history, “an African nation never conquered, never colonized, never subservient” (Bukatman, 2022). As Wakanda hides from the world, it recasts the symbolism of the “veil” metaphor Du Bois deployed to mark the separateness of Black experience. In Black Panther,

The ‘vast veil’ is no longer a tool of dehumanization, but instead is employed willfully as the secret marker of Wakanda’s immunity from definitions imposed from without. Wakanda has decided how it will be seen or unseen, just as Black Panther has decided for his Black embodied self. (Bukatman, 2022)

Wakanda reverses all sorts of stereotypes about Blackness and animality, darkness, and “primitiveness.” Through extensive research in Africa — including Lesotho, Senegal, South Africa, and Kenya — the design teams of the films create a detailed world which incorporates real traditions and aesthetics from a variety of African cultures. In Wakanda Forever, guards use precise rhythms of water-drums to lower the protective barrier around Wakanda, an exemplary Afrofuturist moment in which African culture is interwoven tightly with sci-fi tech.

The Black Panther films are not immune to criticism. The movies spawned the term “Wakandafication”: “the homogenization of African cultures into something singular and ahistorical, more palatable (too palatable, is the suggestion) to white audiences” (Bukatman, 2022). Perhaps Wakanda’s Pan-African aesthetic and uncolonized history, clearly pictured through an American gaze, is oversimplified, leading to a “flattening, rather than an honoring, of diversity, an aesthetics divorced from regional histories and traditions” (Bukatman, 2022). Not to mention the broader conversation about the commodification of Black bodies and cultures by corporations like Marvel/Disney. 

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