The Gothic is deeply concerned with the relationships between the present and the past and with family histories. Robert Mighall has argued that the Gothic inhabits ‘the historical past’ or else ‘identifies ‘pastness’ in the present, honing in on struggles ‘to exorcise the ghosts of the past’; struggles often complicated or stymied by problematic inheritances capable of destroying otherwise ‘respectable families.’¹

Hey Bakary!

I wanted to get the ball rolling with a confession: I’m a little apprehensive about this review. I’m not sure that these two books, Fred Moten’s Stolen Life and Ryan Hanley’s Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing c. 1770-1830, have much to say to each other. While they’re ostensibly concerned with many of the same topics -- most centrally, black intellectual life -- Moten and Hanley are so different in terms of their epistemological groundings that I wonder how they can be put into conversation productively.