Between Psychoanalysis and History: The Cultural Legacy of Toni Morrison in Modern Black Horror

Abstract

I 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 Nia DaCosta. 1 Throughout her career, Morrison sought to unsettle the conventional boundaries between psychoanalytic and historical discourses, a critical and literary endeavor which comprised a conception 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. In what follows, this essay begins by interrogating the longstanding reception