Between Psychoanalysis and History

The Cultural Legacy of Toni Morrison in Modern Black Horror

Bibliographic Data

ID10944181
AuthorsKevin Pyon (Penn State Harrisburg, Middletown, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume52
Issue2
Pages246-265
Publication date2023-02-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueWomen s Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0049-7878 • E-ISSN: 1547-7045
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00497878.2022.2162054
OpenAlexW4317899176
LanguageEN
References cited16

This essay considers the cultural legacy of Toni Morrison in modern Black horror by exploring the artistic and political lineage between _Playing in the Dark_ (1992) and _Beloved_ (1987) and the film _Candyman_ (2021), co-written and directed by Mia DaCosta. Throughout her career, Morrison sought to unsettle the conventional boundaries between psychoanalytic and historical discourses, a critical and literary endeavor which comprised a connection of the history and legacy of racial slavery as a (genre of) horror. Whereas _Playing in the Dark_ revises Freudian concepts of the unconscious, repression, and dreams to rethink the universal psychoanalytic subject as a transhistorical racialized subject, _Beloved_ unveils the moral panic over the emergence of the so-called "urban underclass" as the resurfacing of the repressed memory of racial slavery from the American unconscious. In her reboot of Bernard Rose's 1992 _Candyman_, DaCosta takes up Morrison's cultural legacy by depicting a Black male protagonist whose confrontation with the horror of racial slavery leads to an existential collapse of the boundary between his personal psyche and the enslaved past, ultimately resulting in his monstrous transformation into Candyman

Art · Art history · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

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