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Black People Suck

No, no, no — not like that. In a spate of 1970s blaxploitation films and in horror traditions since, narratives of the black fantastic have given us a lot to sink our own teeth into in all the right ways. Within the black horror canon, representation has come a long way from the days of strictly creature-feature, jungle-fever stereotypical roles or euphemistic mystical or metamorphic films of transformation tales on the genre periphery that tilted towards anything but a shared humanity or afforded decency; as seen in the branching outspread of mid-century horror films and on, black actors and creators began to break into varied and nuanced narratives that constructed empathy and visibility at a scale up on the silver screen never seen before — but this progress didn’t mean that the black horror genre was done with inhuman folklore. 

Vampire legend was already not unheard of in black culture — historic folkloric fantastic telling of soucouyants, bloodthirsty, skin-slipping hag-women craving their youth by way of drinking at the Fountain of children's pulses, peppers into much of African and Creole lore, but in the more robustly-seen horror genre of the cinematic West, vampire stories had long been dominated by the pale, dramatic, often flamboyant Drac in the darkly gothic European castle — images of the sublime horror of our archetypal bloodsuckers as constructed by Bram Stoker and, perhaps even more so, early 20th Century Universal Pictures drama. The subversion of this type of vampire aesthetic, then, pioneered a newly recurring space in the horror genre for black leads to occupy and reinvent. 

It is ironic, considering the perceptive liminality of vampires in popular lore, that these films would become a mirror up on the silver screen for black audiences to see themselves reflected in, but much of the historical framing, smouldering and foreboding elegance, and cultural conditions created in pioneering black vampire films were refreshingly new instances of sight of the self on the screen. Even a playful conceit, like 1972’s Blacula, directed by William Crain, appeals to themes of black narrative in the persistence of history and significance of bloodline, social and embodied hungers seen as threatening by the mainstream, a grappling with the self in addiction and desire, and a centering of the body and libido in ways that previous black stories often maneuvered around or played to dominant white impressions and fears. Prince Mamuwalde, the real christening of the titular sobriquet, must navigate existence as the socially abject, differentiated in space and society by virtue of being excluded from a daylight society through the stigma and stigmata that would prove deadly were he to surface from suppression — despite his elegance and commanding presence, he is trapped in a half-life, snagged in the veil itself as he is estranged from himself and other by virtue of his condition. 

In response to Blacula, Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess (1973) introduced markedly different stylistic cues from new wave experimental filmmaking at the time, registering a representative — if not as broadly accessible — tale of an anthropologist’s haunting by his own blood and that which he craves. In fact, accessibility was not just a matter of its reception, but the film’s distribution and circulation for many years; though critically acclaimed, a single remaining reel was sequestered down to the archival lair of the MoMA for years, mirroring once again a differentiated space and resistance of — or rejection from — integration with broad society that continued to characterize black vampire horror. A recut of the film, retitled Blood Couple to not-so-subtly characterize the central pairing, was released and circulated on video in the original cut’s absence for years, resuturing Gunn’s narrative into an entirely “botched” mockery of the original in an attempt to appeal to a broader blaxploitation audience — the details of which are murky at best, but offensive enough in their creative liberties taken that Gunn and other major creatives on the project struck their association with the new release entirely. 

Research to follow intends to expand on this issue, as the deficit in archival accessibility has been inverted in the resurrection of Ganja and Hess from whence it was entombed. Though Ganja and Hess has returned to a slow-burning cult following, readily found on streaming services, Blood Couple seemingly shriveled with the Internet age and abandonment of blaxploitation cinema for the new black film scene in the 1990s; now, departing from UCLA’s formalized black horror study, a researcher must stay hungry for this void in the discourse — VHS hot in hand and fresh from the obscurity of the eBay vaults, ready to suck it dry.

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We Were Not Content With The Stories

Despite nearing its 30th anniversary, Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992) continues to create a fervent buzz in the black horror collective -- and not just for its apiary imagery, though the film has become a staple in the iconic horror aesthetics of the 1990s for its visceral entomological body horror. Prior to the nascent black horror renaissance or the roots of black representation in fantastic genres during the mid to late 1990s, Candyman was an uncommon standout, unusual in its centralizing of a developed black supernatural antagonist and strong racially centered narratives resplendent with didactic commentary on real-life horrors straddling the color line; however, its reception as a near-inarguable staple of the black horror canon is complicated and divisive, and many fans and critics indict the film for the staggeringly white lens that it trains onto its worldbuilding and narrative resolve. 

The mythic exploration, racially-coded narratives, and bodily representation in the film make strong, pointedly racialized social commentary, but it is commentary that comes at the expense of the very underprivileged black communities that the film attempts to use as backdrop in Chicago's Cabrini-Green projects; despite having many of the right ingredients for an incisive and timely black horror, the film's direction of black trauma and oppression through a white lens commodifies and exploits the pain of both the empathetically-coded black antagonist in Candyman himself and the other black residents of the projects that he terrorizes while perpetuating harmful stereotypes of the residents of the "ghetto" and centering both a white savior and the predatory conception of black men's desire for white women at its primary conflict. It is through a young white doctoral student that we bear witness to these grotesque black stories, and the horror we experience is portrayed through her shock and recoil from the harsh realities of life in the projects. Criticism of the film is not new, brought on by a freshly cynical and “politically correct” audience accustomed to more sensitive and inclusive black horror projects of the new era; The Chicago Tribune itself published on the not-so-sweet taste it left in black viewers’ mouths on its initial release in 1992, citing concerns of its representation as “‘worrisome’. . . [and]  ‘irresponsible and racist’” in how it portrays vulnerable intercity life and interracial, predatory love (Lovell). 

Tony Todd’s performance as the titular myth cannot be overstated; powerful, commanding villains with decadent and entrancing shibboleths of arcane and nearly-Biblical language are not frequently seen in any horror movie, much less as a role for a black villian, where insidious elegance is often overwritten for more stereotypically thuggish fare. However, as with all media the critical gavel deems to be problematic (and with good reason), modern audiences must receive the film with the knowledge that ultimately white stories -- that of Helen -- that are penned in white ink and shot through a white lens with blackness as a thematic conceit are always primed to discredit and misrepresent the stories of black characters penned as plot fodder for the benefit of white redemption and approval. These stories, though, are culturally critical to the building momentum of black representation in the horror genre and encouragement of black creators who knew they could script more justice to the lived experience -- and, of course, they also have salvage value. A tale of black brutality inherent has threads of empathy in its concession of Candyman himself as the spirit of a lynching victim, and a keen audience feels terror for the project residents terrorized both by their spectral haunter and their uninvited spectator. In moments of narrative doubt and unjustifiable action by Helen as she raises a butcher knife to the dim and swinging light of a young mother’s unit in the project and stabs her in the arm as the woman tries to defend herself from Helen’s decontextualized fugue state, we can easily imagine the horror underpinning this story as seen through black eyes that catch the nuances of the manipulation and ethnographic scrutiny of the white academy in the university and white Academy in Hollywood -- just as we can believe in the new myths to come.

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The Dead Wake — The Dead, Woke

George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a critical piece of the broader horror canon for its reinvention of contemporary zombie lore and other suspensive tropes that have been naturalized into horror homages to this day -- much of the classic world-building of zombie articulation, contagion, and undead mortality that we have come to take as broadly standardized and par for the course in its subgenre contemporaries was conceived in Romero’s tight 96 minute runtime. However, unlike many other "classic" horror movies that have been overwhelmingly historically white, it overlaps in importance with the black horror canon; the beneficial blind casting of Duane Jones as Ben, the film's then-unlikely protagonist, is a landmark piece of black representation in his portrayal of a stalwart, heroic lead free from the caricatured stereotypes that burdened the rare black side character or the sensationalist stereotyping rampant in the nascent and keenly named blaxploitation genre of the decade to come. Though the role was not written as intentionally black, the presence of a black body in the film changes how we read the narrative; the stifling power exchanges and suspicion of one another within the claustrophobic house they board up in and otherwise entirely white cast are inherently racialized and reflect late-'60s tensions inherent in the zeitgeist during the Civil Rights era without creating a oversimplified race fable.

Black horror has itself shuffled and moaned through a contentious relationship with the zombie myth; while responsible for some of the first cultural entries of black horror into the fold through its metaphysical origins in black folklore and religion, early zombies were often a product of black exoticization: portraits of feared, mysterious black culture helped to summon the “magical negro” fiction trope and opposed or corrupted the protagonistic safety and moral center of white Judeo-Christian leads -- though it is worth mentioning here, that White Zombie (1932) tasked Bela Lugosi as a nefarious white Haitian “voodoo master,” demonizing the culture without even affording the presence of a leading black body onscreen.

By the time Romero reinvents standard operating fare for how we construct the subgenre, zombies are no longer strictly indicative of the menace of unknown culture and spirituality, but most typically a contagion narrative that genre academics have unpacked as indicative of the full spectrum of socially symptomatic metaphor, from disease to consumerism to anti-intellectualism. In Night of the Living Dead, despite Jones’s bleeding-edge presence as a black body onscreen, the film is not indicated as strictly allegorical in its use of race, creating the possibility that against the anxious room tone of a country fraught with uncertainty, black characters and therefore black stories can experience the background radiation of racial tension and still confront a story and narrative identity that is not predicated on their subordinate national status alone, as many films default to in both flattering and humiliating instances of representation. Ben’s assertive, unshakably competent characterization in a moment of national panic and disorientation is an antidote to the disease of the slapstick, cowardly “cooning” of black side characters like that of Mantan Moreland’s in King of the Zombies (1941); he is intelligent, steady, practical, and ethical in taking charge and taking care of the refugees of the house, even when opposing leadership threatens to endanger them. 

Despite the distance from overly-determined racial didacticism, the image of black leadership at a time of real-life national unravel harkens to figureheads that cinched turning points in real-life culture, including Martin Luther King, Jr., whose death was infamously announced as Romero drove to New York with the film reels of his own imagining of the untimely death-by-gunshot of black leadership in his car in the ending of Night of the Living Dead -- a dark serendipity that may have secured the film's impact to come.

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The Value of Creative and Destructive Horror

It’s a miracle when black characters survive the horror movie, especially in the growing trend of realism in a narrative’s white antagonistic opposition; the black horror renaissance has finally begun to normalize justice in their horror stories, and characters are less and less likely to become trending hashtags within their own universes. Resolution of a black horror climax comes guilt-free and demonstrates a character’s innocence when the black protagonist is not forced to kill or maim the antagonist in the process -- when white opposition (as it so often is) destroys itself without undue action from the black protagonists, they can walk away from the nightmare conservatively, traditionally innocent, all the more palatable to a broad audience for their clean hands and the reassurance that in due time, the corrupt system will destroy itself -- patience, survival, and the time to wait for the sun to rise in the safety of the morning is all the black body must execute in order to see a melioristic world naturally mend corruption with justice. 

Right?

Nah. The need for black protagonists -- and by their extension, black audiences -- to passively resist and manage to survive external menace in order to be free from victimization has been largely squashed by more radical horror creators; in retribution horror, characters are given a path to their own agency and self-actualization in justice against the odds, providing catharsis to an audience that does not often see the same in their real lives. Rusty Cundieff's Tales From the Hood (1995) paints its early retribution horror in four episodic titular tales that tell of real-life black horror turned supernatural. The anthology structure allows the plots to cover a wide range of modern issues -- police brutality, child and spousal abuse, gang violence, systemic political discrimination -- but each narrative circles back to agency and retribution in the use of creative art as a form of expression, release, and power in achieving revenge or reclaiming safety for the creator. A corrupt cop is symbolically crucified by heroin needles amongst the neglected homeless of the city and morphed into a street mural painted in sanguine lacquer across from the furious visage of the activist he lynched in cold blood; a young boy manifests the monster of an abusive home on paper and, in giving it creative form, can twist and burn the monster of a father menacing him and his mother into bodily ash; small crafted dolls give shape and action to the displaced souls of untethered lynching victims, embodying their experience one more time just long enough for them to overtake the racist politician who has possessed the bones of the property they died on. The diegetic creation within each of these segments empowers the battered protagonists to give their trauma form and to mitigate the cruelty of its perpetrators in whichever way they please. 

Creative forms of retribution mirror the shape of black horror at large, as the genre uses its art form -- movies, television, written stories -- to confront, interpret, and reclaim injury inflicted onto the community, ultimately offering catharsis where there often is none in real-life political strife. A Rusty Cundieff or a Jordan Peele is, invariably, giving their own trauma form through the media they produce, therefore reclaiming control over the fates and narrative therein. 

However, phrasing this form of retribution as constructive is still inherently incomplete; the argument for the creative properties of resistance still insists upon a generative and productive outlet for mitigating oppression, and framing it as only creative and artistic neglects the other form of resistance that these examples demonstrate in action taken by black protagonists against their diegetic oppressors. Creation of an additional or alternate system or space in politics, narrative, and the space where they meet is palatable and socially collaborative -- but destruction and embrace of the monstrous is just as, if not more, empowering. 

The innocent and sanitized black protagonist presents its resistance in a victim-framed mindset, defanging opposition in a moral bid for the audience’s favor, capturing a photo negative of black stereotypes of brutality and violence as a subversive strategy. However, black horror protagonists can find power in accepting the tropes of the archetypical horror villain into the folds of their protagonists’ practice. Black stories are often riddled with the power of the grisly supernatural in the defensive-- and offensive-- actions of their leads; our glimpse into the reality of the white world’s monster under the bed and behind the veil recalibrates our threat assessment by invoking empathy with black characters and constructing a justification in violence for the downtrodden and abused. An oppositional resistance often asks for a creative alternative match to the dominant group’s power, in civility and cinema alike; subversive resistance often troubles the viewer with the Lordeian question of whether or not you can truly dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. However, an embrace of the monstrous as agency and empowerment -- an abjection praxis -- acknowledges the displaced nature of black communities in supernaturally realistic horrors and sees in them a powerful weaponization of othering instead of the need to neutralize black folks as threat. 

The aforementioned retribution resolutions in Tales From the Hood, for instance, could in any other horror subgenre have been the singular villain of each segment’s story; a necromanced, vengeful body and the body horror metamorphosis of a town’s juridical center in the police force, a near-vodou drawing capable of manipulating its flesh and blood image into a broken body, and a hoard of vindictive, possessed dolls bent on revenge all are coded in shapes of horror’s antagonistic camp, but the use in racialized retribution horror on the behalf of the moral protagonists portrayed in Rusty Cundieff’s film instead link black characters to sources of second-sight supernatural power imbued from similarly differentiated realms to those that black bodies have been historically outcast to. Made by black hands, for black eyes, this takes a radical shape in the face of perhaps tired respectability politics -- the narrative move to morally side the audience with an aggressor of traditional generic terror makes the argument that there is justification in violent redress against long-standing oppressors. While not traditional in its cinematic ethics, this is worth percolating on. How often do we get to be monstrous to our monsters?

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Double Vision & Double Consciousness

Black horror often sees its protagonists isolated in a crowd of unlike faces, not seeing double -- but sometimes, audiences can see that fear of the unknown pales in the face of the familiar. In Jordan Peele’s sophomore release, Us (2019), political uprising takes on a subterranean meaning when a mirrored society of test subjects -- the Tethered-- surface to confront their optical doppelgangers and claim the privilege of surface-dwelling society that has been long denied to them in the underground. When our central familial protagonists come face to matched face with their own likenesses, it is not the eerie horror of shapeshifting we must confront, but the near-miss reality of a suppressed class that looks like (and easily could’ve been) them -- could’ve been us.

Infamously and superstitiously archetyped as a portent of death, the sight of a doppelganger is a classically eerie form of hostility and alienation from the “self” in horror -- textual applications of its psychoanalytic interpretations from the writings of likes of Freud and Lacan explore the doppelganger as an uncanny and hostile return of the repressed: often stronger, more surveillant, formidable, and more vicious than we are, they are all at once strange and familiar to us -- and almost always bent on our destruction and replacement. As the dispossessed surface to claim the family’s middle class privilege that they’ve never enjoyed, it is this “self as other” that presents a stark reminder that recognition of the self in the faces of your supposed corollaries in the black community haunts families who have mobilized and assimilated to an elevated socioeconomic status and more proportionately white strata -- a spectral vision of near-misses and what some take to be demographic betrayal, as too long have the underclass been the dark shadow to a society that has gladly forgotten them. The antagonistic double vision in Us is especially transgressive in black horror for the denial of diegetic comfort in recognition of those like you -- seeing yourself and your community in others is usually a source of comfort in black horror (take Peele’s 2017 release, Get Out), but here, it’s a threat returned from the disenfranchised bowels of the country in pursuit of retribution against those who have “escaped” into the higher classes. 

Though Jason, the young son of Adelaide, the family matriarch, hits the recognition nail on the head in seeing the jarring similarities between dueling sides of the living room upon their first run-in with one another, the Tethered do not respond in kind. Adelaide asks Red, her double, “Who are you?” -- but the Tethered see not similarity, but the national status of all like them and the injurious divide they’ve come to repair with stirring revolution. “We’re Americans,” Red rasps in an unused voice that is finally speaking up. Perhaps the self-recognition does not go quite far enough, here; the need for insistence that the black underclass have lived in a differentiated America but an America all the same has been a long-standing theme in the laments of black creators. It’s unlikely that Peele doesn’t purposefully know his Langston Hughes: “I, too, am America.” 

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Black Horror and Narratives of Suffering

In their sanguine smears of crimson across the silver screen, horror movies have always painted impressionistic images of metaphorical real-life anxieties; our recreational fears bed down closely with the cultural conditions of the moment in which they were conceived. However, in such coded terms, audiences often consume these sign systems uncritically; it isn’t groundbreaking to draw parallels between Godzilla and nuclear anxiety, B-movie 50-foot women and the midcentury atomic age, or vampire resurgence and the 1980s AIDS epidemic, but the social conditions these movies are mapped onto are not typically on the moviegoer’s mind as they kick back buckets of searingly salty popcorn and cower behind plush seats in the dark of the theatre. Herein lies black horror's didactic value as a medium that helps to illuminate historical and modern issues within the overt fabric of its narrative and imagery -- black horror isn’t hiding what it’s talking about, and black audiences are invited to participate in the catharsis of seeing their own fears on screen in hypothetical situations without the burden of witnessing real-life violence. 

Or are they? As we enter into the study of black horror in a moment of black horror renaissance and national racial tension, we must consider the political implications of replicating brutal racial trauma in a venue largely taken to be recreational entertainment. The very inclusion of black characters in a genre formerly exclusionary, abusive, or maligned is striking, and global voices are raising in choir-praise for the nascent popularity of black horror; creators like Jordan Peele are broadly celebrated as bringing authentic black life (and death) to screens at last, and historically contextualized shows like Lovecraft Country (2020-) are praised for pulling no punches about the true horrors of racism through the ages. A history of social symptoms in black myth and reality surface in a multiplicity of themes: the legacy of slavery and subordination, the appropriation and coveting of black culture and bodies, interracial relations and tensions, black intuition, complicit white liberal culture, isolation, othering, the inheritance of trauma and domination, and the consequences of difference, to name just a flinching few. 

The question of authenticity and responsibility in narrative, though, is hard to grapple with after such a long history of absence from -- or reckless “representation” within -- the genre. Diverse stories, depiction, and creators are critical to making media space for blackness, and it is a chief value of entertainment to stoke these ideas and start these conversations at times when viewers have their guards down -- folks are more receptive when they're kicking back, suturing with the screen, and watching TV than when they're doomscrolling through the exhaustion of the day's fraught tensions in the news -- but we must ask if the underpinning of every single black story with the narrative-important presence of trauma induces plot exhaustion, threatens to retraumatize black audiences, and ultimately denies imaginative diversity in the content of black stories. (Many black critics have cited the same issue within the onslaught of Important Race Movies popular in the Academy in the contemporary theatre, and we can turn the same questions of not frequency or longevity of representation but content to black horror, as many critics appraised the inescapable slavery narrative in the same ways.)

Should we be concerned with the privilege of escapism in the horror genre? White audiences see their fears reflected in horror, yes, but much of the popcorn-appeal for blockbuster scares is the opportunity to be voyeuristic to others’ poor choices and dire circumstances -- horror may teach us about ourselves and help us to unpack our own anxieties, but it is also frequently described as an exercise in comparison. Yes, you just lost your job, but watch this teenage waif get chased by a machete-wielder for 96 minutes; it could be worse. An element of disconnect lets horror viewers enjoy terror on screen at the characters’ expense when they do not relate too closely to them; Jaws seems a little less scary if you live in a landlocked state, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre seems a little less immediate a threat to you if you live in Manhattan. The savvy horror fan leans on a reassuring mantra: I would never run upstairs. I would never turn my back on the dead-but-not-really-dead body. I would never leave the weapon lying out in the open. I would survive this movie.

White audiences leave the anxiety they experience on the behalf of black characters subject to black horror in the theatre as the house lights come up; black audiences enter and leave with the fear of relation stuck to them like spilled soda laminated onto the soles of their shoes. The modern black horror character shares in a smart black sensibility and intuition for danger that growing up in a culture that necessitates a survival mindset creates: black characters often do everything “right,” but still suffer brutality. The black horror fan percolates in an unsettling mantra: I would run out of the house early, too. I would grab the baseball bat early, too. I would do the same as he did. I know my aunt, uncle, dad, brother, ancestors, contemporaries did the same when it happened to them. I know what the police lights in the rearview mean, and it’s not the relief of help arriving in the last ten minutes of the movie. I know what this terror is like -- not just terror like it. I might not survive this movie. I might not survive my movie.

You wanted representation? Up on the screen -- that’s you. That’s personal. 

What does it mean for violence toward black bodies to be commodified via the media industry, often consumed by non-black eyes who walk out of the theatre with no repercussions, especially at a time when virality of brutality towards black lives is more visible than ever, forever shared and looping across digital spaces? Black horror has often re-created thematic violence in detail, but in the trend to take it further in pursuit and daylighting of historical injustice, real blood has intermingled with stage; Lovecraft Country recreates scenes from the Civil Rights archive in one-to-one scale, and in a recent-of-this-writing Lovecraft Country episode, the death and funeral of Emmett Till is wound into the narrative directly. Is it responsible for horror to borrow the blood of our ancestors for its fictional worlds in such a literal manner? Where do we draw the line? When is it exploitative? Exhausting? Empowering?

Trauma narratives are critically important stories to tell -- warts and all -- but if fiction media is a place to be inventive and especially a place for the potential escape for black audiences into a narrative world where they can see themselves on screen in an entertainment setting, we must ask what it means for your inclusion onscreen to see all of your stories rooted in the very real social abuse inflicted on your lived experience. Much of black social identity is bruised with this  shared experience and history of social trauma, but by recreating this in creative media with few exceptions, are we mandating that our stories must be about suffering? It is worth asking if the very act of a representation in media that showed us living our lives -- even our fears -- with no acutely racial repercussions or menace would be just as -- if not more -- subversive. 

Of course, these questions aside, art doesn’t have a singular purpose, and if it did, it would not be entertainment and ease; this is an idea horror knows well, and discomfort is often productive. Black horror is not just a place for reconciling and affirming black fear in a controlled setting. It also functions as a teaching medium -- a vehicle for fear and empathy, horror coded with many real issues and lived experiences like Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) or Us (2019) is a masterclass in conveying the consequences of otherwise abstract social injuries. Peele’s works, among others, resist the trappings of performing blackness as a narrative product for white audiences to consume. While Hollywood has gradually introduced more black bodies on screen over the years, they have often been failingly voyeuristic in nature, puppeted for the consumption of non-black audiences and relying on aforementioned distance and narrative device or on exploitative "correctness" for the purpose of letting white moviegoers indulge in recreational "wokeness" for the duration of the runtime. Black visions from black lenses for black eyes are always inherently revolutionary, to this end. Peele's impact in criticizing the "post-racial lie" of the Obama era spoke truth to power in symbols entertaining and cathartic for black audiences and cut a wide swath of space for black creators to come in proving a viable market for black horror that resists personal and narrative stereotype by modeling representation after wholly gestalt black lives -- not MacGuffins or monsters for white protagonists. Modern black horror has also provided black viewers with narratives of the possibility of survival, displaced from the realities of personal consequence, allowing a freeing of the genre to be both thrilling and reflective -- coping mechanism and entertainment. White audiences are confronted by this black lense when they are not “in” on the terror, accosting them in unexpected ways and inviting viewers to empathize with Black characters as human and to experience embodied terror on their behalf through the horror medium -- a strikingly effective mode of cinematic empathy.

Celebration and criticism are, of course, not diametrically opposed to one another; these arguments exist in tandem within the discourse. Going forward, we must continue to grapple with the positivity and power of this generic shift while staying critical of the black horror canon at large. We must see the theatre as not a Sunken Place unto itself but a space open to representation, reconciliation, and imagination. 

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Blog #1 - AFAM 188 FA20.