Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

ABSTRACT

The author traces the Gothic origins and themes in Jordan Peele’s film Us (2019) to slave narratives and Female Gothic fiction. Reflecting on the ancestral implications of these connections, she focuses on diegetic spectatorship through the lens of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double-consciousness” and his conception of the “veil.” The author considers the film’s dramatic performance of traumatized Black looking relations and their psychic consequences, appropriately and grotesquely exaggerated by the genre, but fundamentally authentic. As the film demonstrates, this fraught spectatorship engenders a self-estrangement.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Kelli Weston

Kelli Weston, Ph.D., is a film critic and programmer based in Brooklyn. She specializes in nonfiction and horror cinema, with a particular emphasis on the visual narratives of Black women filmmakers and racialized spectatorship dynamics.