Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction. Jerry Rafiki Jenkins

Among the central preoccupations of contemporary monster theory is the nature of the monster itself—are monsters real or imaginary? Is monstrosity a sign of an innate deviance, or are monsters capable of choice and change? Are human beings who commit acts of depravity monsters? Jerry Rafiki Jenkins’s Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction is a convincing and often surprising reading of human monsters. Jenkins examines writers of Black American horror fiction who highlight the human monster’s capacity for “racial sadism,” or the “pleasure that one receives from inflicting pain on members of a particular racialized group or watching that group in pain” (13). Because Jenkins claims that the presence of monsters, human or otherwise, distinguishes horror from other speculative genres, the book offers a broad definition of “Black horror fiction,” including texts that one might not immediately think of as horror, such as Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979), Sapphire’s Push (1996), or Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). These “monsters of anti-Blackness” both manufacture and devour Black people and Black bodies in pain in order to “defend or aspire to certain notions of Americanness” (15). Black horror fiction, Jenkins argues, is particularly adept at asking us to question why (and how) anti-Black monsters derive “ideological pleasure” (or “ideo-pleasure”) from Black pain, and how representations of that ideo-pleasure in turn “make[s] them repulsive and barely human” (15).