Browsing by Author "Daniels, DeAnna Monique"

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    Thinking Through the Slash: Horror’s Entanglement in Black Religion and Culture
    (2023-09-11) Daniels, DeAnna Monique; Pinn, Anthony B
    Thinking Through the Slash: Horror’s Entanglement in Black Religion and Culture core question reframes the nature of Black religion by asking how “horror” theoretically informs its formation and aims. Therefore, I interrogate how horror provides the space to reimagine and reinterpret the meaning(s) of religious experience. Taking seriously horror’s relationality to religion changes the rules of interpretation. It creates new modes of analysis that consider the interlocking relationships between race, gender, religion, and popular culture and the contexts in which these categories exist. My dissertation investigates the cultural, social, and aesthetic dimensions of Black religious experience through attention to the relationship between religion, race, gender, disability, and horror. I argue that horror forms the point of origin for Black religion, and a turn to horror provides a critical hermeneutic that helps complicate central themes within religion. Principally, scholars of religion employ horror themes and tropes—such as terror, death, ghosts, and hauntings—without seriously theorizing horror or considering the layered possibilities represented in the full scope of horror’s entanglement with religion. New dimensions and conversations develop when horror assemblages—as I call them—are unearthed in the speculative horror fiction and cinema of Octavia Butler, Jordan Peele, Toni Morrison, and others. This turn to horror as a generative analytic offers a re-articulation of religious meaning that takes seriously the varied multi-dimensional realities that unfold in both the non-realist and ‘real lived experience’ and existence of Black people. Therefore, this dissertation brings together a network of critical theories—including critical race theory, disability theory, literary theory, and cultural studies—in relation to the study of Black religion to explore the significance and generative data sources of horror found in religio-cultural productions and expressions.