African American Gothic and Horror have begun to receive more focused scholarly attention in the last decade or so, and interest has only increased with the release of films such as Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Ryan Coogler’s recent box-office hit Sinners (2025). Meanwhile, Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean Gothic forms have yet to receive much critical attention or attain cross-cultural success, a gap that is arguably due to prolonged histories of erasure and particular manifestations of anti-Blackness in these regions. This session aims to begin teasing out a framework of analysis for the sub-field of Afro-Latin American Gothic. While “Gothic” is itself a European phenomenon and thus needs careful consideration when applied to non-European and non-Anglo contexts, approaching diasporic literatures through a Gothic lens opens up possibilities for deeper ideological, cultural and historical understanding in both localized and cross-cultural contexts. Curiously, the Gothic appears in Latin America and the Caribbean (and U.S. Latinx works) in both muted and explicit ways, adapting traditional Gothic strategies to local contexts to contend with colonial traumas, motherhood and gender anxieties, social and economic inequality, moments of national or global unrest, and more—from abolitionist novels of the nineteenth century to Afro-futurist works of today. This panel welcomes meditations on Afro-Latin American Gothic theory and analysis across all mediums. It also welcomes comparative analyses between Afro-Latin American Gothic and African, African American, and other Afro-Gothics in the diaspora, as well as the Gothic’s connection to African spiritualisms in these regions. Finally, explorations into how the Gothic lends itself to other genres—from the speculative and magical realism to Afrofuturism—are welcome.

Please note that while the NeMLA conference is hybrid, this panel is fully virtual, and that abstract submissions should be in English.