Searching for Sycorax

Black Women's Hauntings of Contemporary Horror

By Kinitra D. Brooks

Rutgers University Press

Searching for Sycorax highlights the unique position of Black women in horror as both characters and creators. Kinitra D. Brooks creates a racially gendered critical analysis of African diasporic women, challenging the horror genre’s historic themes and interrogating forms of literature that have often been ignored by Black feminist theory. Brooks examines the works of women across the African diaspora, from Haiti, Trinidad, and Jamaica, to England and the United States, looking at new and canonized horror texts by Nalo Hopkinson, NK Jemisin, Gloria Naylor, and Chesya Burke. These Black women fiction writers take advantage of horror’s ability to highlight U.S. white dominant cultural anxieties by using Africana folklore to revise horror’s semiotics within their own imaginary. Ultimately, Brooks compares the legacy of Shakespeare’s Sycorax (of The Tempest) to Black women writers themselves, who, deprived of mainstream access to self-articulation, nevertheless influence the trajectory of horror criticism by forcing the genre to de-centralize whiteness and maleness.

As an avid fan of science fiction, horror, and fantasy, I found Searching for Sycorax's interrogation of the erasure of black women in mainstream horror compelling, timely, and significant. LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, coeditor of Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions

Searching for Sycorax is unlike anything I have ever read. Brooks’ excavation of Black women’s presence in horror is a ground-breaking, game changing must read for scholars and aficionados alike.' Susana M. Morris, author of Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women's Literature

Author Kinitra D. Brooks was featured in an article in The Cut on a similar issue of black women in popular culture, entitled 'Beyoncé Is the Leonardo da Vinci of Instagram.' Emilia Petrarca, TheCut.com

A deep exploration how Black women create horror that spawns a new knowledge of the genre that worries the intersections of race and gender to gain a better understanding, and continue the ongoing conversation as well as activity in the Black Women's Horror Renaissance. Graveyard Shift Sisters

BOOK CORNER: Author highlights influence of black women in horror' by Marissa Wells LA Wave

Discusses black women of the Americas and Britain as creators and characters in the horror genre. Chronicle

Students tap into popular culture to explore theories of race and gender' Searching for Sycorax mention UTSA Today

Why Are There So Many Bunnies in Scary Movies?' by Cady Lang - interview with Dr. Kinitra D. Brooks Time

Us Makes Us Look in the Mirror—What If We Don't Like What We See?,' by Kinitra D. Brooks Elle

Mention in '#StokersSoWhite: 2016-2018, the fall of tokenism at the HWA'
https://sfbayview.com/2019/10/stokerssowhite-2016-2018-the-fall-of-tokenism-at-the-hwa/ San Francisco Bay View

KINITRA D. BROOKS is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas, San Antonio.

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction. Searching for Sycorax:
Black Women and Horror 1

1. The Importance of Neglected Intersections: Characterizations of Black Women in Mainstream Horror Texts 16

2. Black Feminism and the Struggle for Literary Respectability 41

3. Black Women Writing Fluid Fiction: An Open Challenge to Genre Normativity 56

4. Folkloric Horror: A New Way of Reading Black Women’s Creative Horror 95

Conclusion. Sycorax’s Power of Revision:
Reconstructing Black Women’s Counternarratives 127
Appendix: Creative Work Summary 133
Notes 167
Index 195

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