Leila Taylor - Darkly: Black History and America's Gothic Soul — in conversation with Ericka Taylor — at Politics and Prose at Union Market
A former “goth” kid, Taylor, now Creative Director at Brooklyn Public Library, finds in the gothic subculture pervading today’s music, TV, and fashion a telling metaphor for America’s past and ongoing struggle with racism. Combining cultural criticism with stories of her own experience as a black woman in a country still pervaded by white supremacy, Taylor traces the gothic’s haunted houses and dark secrets back to the nation’s history of chattel slavery and analyzes the genre’s motifs of terror and muffled heartbeats as reflections of the acts of white violence against Black people and the Black community’s anger and grief. Taylor will be in conversation with Ericka Taylor, the organizing director for DC Working Families and a freelance writer.
