Horrible Imaginings: Monstrosities of Desire in Kara Walker's Slavery! Slavery! and American Horror Story: Coven

Lekeisha Hughes turns to the characterization of 19th century figures Delphine LaLaurie and Marie Laveau in American Horror Story: Coven (2013) and the silhouetted figures in Kara Walker’s 1997 installation Slavery!... [ view full abstract ]

Lekeisha Hughes turns to the characterization of 19^th century figures Delphine LaLaurie and Marie Laveau in American Horror Story: Coven (2013) and the silhouetted figures in Kara Walker’s 1997 installation Slavery! Slavery!, in order to explore a “discourse of seduction” that has been and continues to be central to the imagination and constitution of the antebellum South (Hartman 1997, 87). This discourse of seduction, in which sexual domination and the right to manage lifeoperate in concert, is unfurled through an explicit engagement of horror operating within these texts. Through an interrogation of these two works, I explore how imaginings of the Southern gothic negotiate visual spectacles of horror at the site of black suffering in which the normativity of sexual violence establishes a link between racial formation and sexual subjection through the monstrous. Of particular concern is how Walker’s Slavery! Slavery! and American Horror Story: Coven utilize conventions of the sensational, the desirable, and the grotesque in the Southern gothic genre.