Leila Taylor | Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul

As part of our 2020 New School Alumni Reading List, we’re pleased to present the next installment of our live book talk series. Join Leila Taylor, MA Liberal Studies ’18, as she discusses her book Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul with New School professor Dominic Pettman.

Part memoir and part cultural critique, Taylor’s book explores the dark heart of the American gothic, analyzing the ways it relates to race in America in the twenty-first century, including the persistence of white supremacy and the ubiquity of Black death that feeds a national culture of terror and a perpetual undercurrent of mourning.

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Leila Taylor is a writer and designer whose work examines the gothic in Black culture, horror, and the aesthetics of melancholy. She has essays published in the Journal of Horror Studies and the upcoming New Urban Gothic. She is Creative Director for Brooklyn Public Library and Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul is her first book. She received her MA in Liberal Studies from The New School.

Dominic Pettman is University Professor of Media and New Humanities at the New School. He is the author of numerous books on technology, humans, and other animals; including Creaturely Love (Minnesota), Sonic Intimacy (Stanford), Metagestures (Punctum, with Carla Nappi), and Peak Libido (Polity).