Abstract
In Appropriate (2014), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins unearths the buried horror of the antebellum South by crafting a story about the white, dysfunctional Lafayettes, who visit their family house in Arkansas for an estate sale. In the process, they discover the secret of their deceased patriarch – that he collected photos and body parts of lynched Black men and women as souvenirs. Following the trend established by American Gothic scholars who read the American house as a metonym for the United States and its haunting entanglement with slavery, this article explores how Appropriate uses specific traits of the genre to critique its racialized conventions, particularly the portrayal of slavery as the haunting “dark” guilt of the past. I read the Lafayette family’s collective obsession with lynched body parts across three generations as a form of Gothic doubling. Furthermore, I explore how Jacobs-Jenkins reveals the Gothic horror of the past through the trope of the unseen and repressed Other – mainly through the sound of cicadas – which emphasizes the dismembered body in active pain rather than frozen and preserved in time. Through these interventions, Jacobs-Jenkins disturbs buried and repressed discourses about transatlantic slavery and white supremacy that still haunt the United States today.
Published Version
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