The Gothic Origins of Anti-Blackness: Genre Tropes in Nineteenth-Century Moral Panics and (Abject) Folk Devils

Abstract

‘The Gothic Origins of Anti-Blackness’ considers the intersections between Gothic texts and moral panics, a sociopolitical mechanism first theorized by Stanley Cohen in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972). I revise Cohen's theory to clarify the peculiar eruptions of exponentially violent anti-Black discourses across various eras, noting that the folk devils targeted by moral panics are invariably abject figures upon which society projects a gothic visage. I reveal how the era of the (Anti-)Slavery debates exemplifies the reduction of Black populations to abject folk devils demonized amid white, western moral panics. The essay then explores Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis's Isle of Devils to expose how the moral panic over socioeconomic shifts, white cultural degeneration and slavery manifests in Gothic texts. Lastly the essay reveals how societies re-articulate the tropes and characteristics of such fictional Black ‘devils’ in their discussions of real populations, and the consequences of such renderings.