Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Abstract

ABSTRACT The author traces the Gothic origins and themes in Jordan Peele’s film Us (2019) to slave narratives and Female Gothic fiction. Reflecting on the ancestral implications of these connections, she focuses on diegetic spectatorship through the lens of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double-consciousness” and his conception of the “veil.” The author considers the film’s dramatic performance of traumatized Black looking relations and their psychic consequences, appropriately and grotesquely exaggerated by the genre, but fundamentally authentic. As the film demonstrates, this fraught spectatorship engenders a self-estrangement.