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Gothing the Blues: The Afrogothic, the Afrosurreal and Transcending the Blue Devils in the work of Jean Toomer and Bob Kaufman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2025

Whit Frazier Peterson Open the ORCID record for Whit Frazier Peterson [Opens in a new window]
Whit Frazier Peterson*
Affiliation:
Department of American Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany
*
Email: whitney.peterson@ilw.uni-stuttgart.de
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Abstract

In this paper I examine what I call an Afrogothic aesthetic inherited from Black occult traditions, the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude movement. I argue that it is useful to read Afrogothicism through the lens of Black spirituality and the blues instead of the legacy of slavery through which it has generally been studied, as this evokes Richard Hurd’s argument of Gothicism partaking of the “terrible sublime.” Ultimately, I argue that the avant-garde American poetry movements of the 1950s develop out of this Afrogothic poetic aesthetic that begins with Black poets and novelists.

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Research Article
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Journal of American Studies , First View , pp. 1 - 18
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with British Association for American Studies.

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References

1 Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 133.

2 Maisha L. Wester, “The Gothic in and as Race Theory,” in Jerrold E. Hogle and Robert Miles, eds., The Gothic and Theory: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 53–71, 53.

3 Maisha L. Wester, African American Gothic in the Era of Black Lives Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025), 3.

4 Sheri-Marie Harrison, “New Black Gothic,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 23 June 2018, at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/new-black-gothic.

5 Sybil Newton Cooksey and Tashima Thomas, “Introduction: Afro-Gothic,” Liquid Blackness: Journal of Aesthetics and Black Studies, 6, 2 (2022), 6.

6 Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (Dublin: Printed by Richard Watts in Skinner-Row, 1762), 30; Carol Margaret Davison, History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764–1824 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press 2009), 28.

7 Sybil Newton Cooksey, “Revenant Motion: Danse Macabre in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter,” Liquid Blackness: Journal of Aesthetics and Black Studies, 6, 2 (2022), 88–117.

8 Aldon Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African American Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997), 153, shows how surrealism informs the blues.

9 Jeffrey B. Ferguson, “A Blue Note on Black American Literary Criticism and the Blues,” Amerikastudien/American Studies, 55, 4 (2010), 699–714, 699.

10 Isiah Lavender III, Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019), 20.

11 D. Scot Miller, “Call It Afro-Surreal,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, 43, 34 (2009), 20.

12 Franklin Rosemont and Robin Kelley, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (Austin: University of Texas Press 2009), 21.

13 Amiri Baraka in Michel Oren, “The Umbra Poets’ Workshop, 1962–1965: Some Socio-literary Puzzles,” in Joe Weixlman and Chester J. Fontenot, eds., Studies in Black American Literature, Volume II, Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism (Greenwood, FL: Penkevill, 1986), 177–223, 189.

14 James Smethurst, “Invented by Horror: The Gothic and African American Literary Ideology in Native Son,” African American Review, 35, 1 (Spring 2001), 20–40, 37.

15 Richard Wright, “Memories of My Grandmother,” in Malcolm Wright, ed., The Man Who Lived Underground (New York: Vintage Classics 2021), 161–211, 185.

16 Chester Himes, Conversations with Chester Himes, ed. Michael Fabre and Robert E. Skinner (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press 1995), 140.

17 Aimé Césaire, “An Interview with Aimé Césaire,” in Césaire, A Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press 2000), 79–94, 84.

18 Carol Margaret Davison, History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764–1824 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press 2009), 2.

19 Sybil Newton Cooksey, Tashima Thomas, Leila Taylor, Lea Anderson, John Jennings and Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), “‘Aestheticizing the Void’: An Afro-Gothic Roundtable,” Liquid Blackness: Journal of Aesthetics and Black Studies, 6, 2 (2022), 162–82, 164.

20 Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1993), 554.

21 Ibid., xxvii–xxviii.

22 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 33.

23 Peter C. Muir, Long Lost Blues: Popular Blues in America, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 81.

24 Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues: 40th Anniversary Edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 42.

25 Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 11.

26 Ibid., 283. The red-and-black contrast appears to have been important for Thurman, as even the one issue of Fire!! magazine, which he edited, used this color scheme.

27 Ibid., 284.

28 Amritjit Singh, “Introduction,” in The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman, ed. Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2003), 1–28, 10.

29 Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr, Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 35.

30 Ibid., 137.

31 Maisha Wester, African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 105.

32 Spenser Simrill, “What’s in a Name? A Mystical and Symbolic Reading of Jean Toomer’s ‘Kabnis’,” Langston Hughes Review, 16, 1–2 (Fall–Spring 1999), 89–104, 91–92.

33 Ibid., 90

34 Jean Toomer, Cane, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 31.

35 Max Lüthi, Volksmärchen and Volkssage: Zwei Grundformen erzählender Dichtung (Bern: Francke Verlag 1966), 46–48.

36 Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” in Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage International, 1964), 77–94, 78.

37 Bejamin McKeever, “Cane as Blues,” Negro American Literature Forum, 4, 2 (1970), 61–63, 61; Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” in Ellison, Shadow and Act, 78–79.

38 Toomer, 41.

39 Edgar Allen Poe, “To – Ulalume: A Ballad,” in Robert S. Levine, ed., The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Tenth Edition, Volume B, 1820–1865 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company 2022), 565–68, 566.

40 Toomer, 74.

41 Ibid., 77–78.

42 Melba Joyce Boyd, Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 3.

43 Joe Gonzales, “An Afterword,” Journal of Black Poetry, 1, 12 (Summer–Fall 1969), 75–77, 76; Lorenzo Thomas, “‘Communicating by Horns’: Jazz and Redemption in the Poetry of the Beats and the Black Arts Movement,” African American Review, 26, 2 (Summer 1992), 291–98, 293; Aldon Lynn Nielsen, “‘A Hard Rain’ Looking to Bob Kaufman,” Callaloo, 25, 1 (Winter 2002), 134–45, 136; Douglas Field, “Beats, Black Culture and Bohemianism in Mid-Twentieth-Century New York City,” in Ross Wilson, ed., New York: A Literary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020), 240–51, 243; Steven Belletto, The Beats: A Literary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020), 172.

44 Langston Hughes, “Note on Commerical Theater,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Vintage Classics, 1994), 215–16, 216.

45 Thomas, “Communicating by Horns,” 293.

46 Neeli Cherkovski, “Bob Kaufman Chronology,” in Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, ed. Neeli Cherkovski, Raymond Foye, and Tate Swindell (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2019), xxix–xxxvii, xxxii.

47 Eileen Kaufman, “Laughter Sounds Orange at Night,” in Arthur Knight and Kit Knight, eds., The Beat Vision: A Primary Sourcebook (New York: Paragon House Publishers 1987), 259–68, 260.

48 Kaufman, Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, 11.

49 Nathanial Mackay, “Conte Moro,” in Adalaide Morris, ed., Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 194–212, 195.

50 Federico Garcia Lorca, “Theory and Function of the Duende,” trans. Merryn Williams, in Federico Garcia Lorca: Selected Poems (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books 1992), 220–30, 221.

51 Ibid., 222.

52 Murray, Stomping the Blues, 42.

53 Lorca, 221.

54 Mackay, 195.

55 Lorca, 221.

56 Adam Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 2.

57 Mackay, 201.

58 Nielsen, “‘A Hard Rain’ Looking to Bob Kaufman,” 139.

59 Raymond Foye, “Editorial Note,” in Kaufman, Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, vii; Foye, And When I Die I Won’t Stay Dead (dir. Billy Woodberry, BK Projects, 2015).

60 Foye, And When I Die I Won’t Stay Dead.

61 Bob Kaufman, “DARKWALKING ENDLESSLY,” in Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, 134–35, 134.

62 Ibid., 135.

63 Wright, “Memories of my Grandmother,” 185.

64 Consider the following lyrics from blues luminary Leroy Carr’s “Papa’s on the Housetop,” which to my mind is one of the great statements on the blues in general: “Mama made Papa be quiet as a mouse / So Papa climbed up on the top of the house, / Started making whoopee, started making noise / Stood up and cheered with the rest of the boys.” From here the song just gets stranger, to the point where the blues themselves become the antagonist of the song, which the “Papa” must “put outdoors” by the end of the piece, when he comes back in from the housetop himself. Ultimately what the song illustrates is both the intimate and the antagonistic relationship one has with the blues, which is part and parcel of this terrible sublime. Leroy Carr. “Papa’s on the Housetop,” track 7, The Essential Leroy Carr, Sony Music Entertainment, 2014.

65 Bob Kaufman, “The Ancient Rain,” in Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, 164–69, 164–65.

66 Nielsen, “‘A Hard Rain’ Looking to Bob Kaufman,” 141.

67 Lorca, “Theory and Function of the Duende,” 222–23.

68 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 58, original emphasis.