Among the plethora of incendiary claims we owe to Afropessimism, one in particular cannot fail to strike the literary scholar’s imagination: Frank B. Wilderson’s assertion that narrative is “inherently” anti-black. According to this interpretation, the epistemological roots of Western narrative are to be found in the birth of the modern era, and thus in a Eurocentric system of knowledge also responsible for pseudo-scientific racism, slavery, and the dehumanization of Black people. As a result, Euro-American literature becomes a vessel for deep-seated racialized representations aimed at reinforcing white domination.

This is evident in the gothic, a genre that, as pointed out by H. L. Malchow, developed in symbiosis with colonial discourses on race. Scholars such as Maisha Wester and Corinna Lenhardt have shown how gothic fiction—and American gothic fiction in particular—reiterates dominant discourses of Black otherness and abjection; but also how, when appropriated by the Black Other, this tradition can conversely offer literary strategies to disrupt dominant racial narratives.

Such ambiguity is epitomized by the trope of the ghost. On the one hand, an African American ghost is the perfect representation of the paradigmatic social death that, according to Afropessimism, defines Blackness by virtue of its historical association with enslavement. On the other hand (and drawing on Jacques Derrida), the ghost’s peculiar ontology implicates a spacetime disjuncture that, from a narratological standpoint, becomes a disturbance in the fabric of storytelling itself—and that, on a higher level of abstraction, represents a fissure in the linearity of Western master narratives, including those responsible for Black subjugation.

In this regard, the dynamics of spectrality in African American literature somewhat echo a distinguishingly Black mode of expression: the blues. As defined by Houston A. Baker, the “blues force” is a “matrix” that creates “conditions of possibility” by transforming an “unceasingly oppressive” landscape. By examining the convergence of spectrality and the blues, I argue that these frameworks offer tools for rethinking storytelling in the service of cultural and racial justice, and for constructing narratives capable of accommodating the complexity of Black American existence.

Marco Petrelli is assistant professor of American literature at the University of Pisa. He authored two books, and a number of essays dedicated to the literature and culture of the US South, American Gothic fiction, African American literature, geocriticism and graphic narratives. Among his latest publications are “A Theory of Southern Time and Space: Memory, Place and Identity in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard” (in The Southern Quarterly 58.3), and “‘I need the story to go’: Sing, Unburied Sing, Afropessimism and Black Narratives of Redemption” (in Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays, Edinburgh University Press 2023). He co-founded and is co-editor-in-chief of Jam It!—Journal of American Studies in Italy. His current research project focuses on storytelling, ghosts, and the blues in African American gothic narratives.