Darkly: Black History and America's Gothic Soul Audiobook By Leila Taylor cover art

Darkly: Black History and America's Gothic Soul

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

Darkly: Black History and America's Gothic Soul

By: Leila Taylor
Narrated by: Lachele Carl
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $19.95

Buy for $19.95

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

Leila Taylor takes us into the dark heart of the American gothic, analyzing the ways it relates to race in America in the 21st century.

Haunted houses, bitter revenants, and muffled heartbeats under floorboards - the American Gothic is a macabre tale based on a true story.

Part memoir and part cultural critique, Darkly: Black History and America's Gothic Soul explores American culture's inevitable gothicity in the traces left from chattel slavery. The persistence of white supremacy and the ubiquity of Black deaths feed a national culture of terror and a perpetual undercurrent of mourning.

If the gothic narrative is metabolized fear; if the goth aesthetic is romanticized melancholy; what does that look and sound like in Black America?

©2019 Leila Taylor (P)2019 Watkins Publishing Political Science Politics & Government Heartfelt

People who viewed this also viewed...

The Black Guy Dies First Audiobook By Robin R. Means Coleman, Mark H. Harris cover art
The Black Guy Dies First By: Robin R. Means Coleman, and others
All stars
Most relevant  
A discussion of life as Afro-Goth within a discussion of American, urban, and musical history.

Black Goth

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Taylor has created a thoughtful tapestry woven with contemporary and historical issues related to the gothic, goth subcultures, and race. This is a must read for anyone doing work in the gothic and for those of us embedded within goth subcultures.

Personal, historical, and incredibly important

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Great examination of American history, and current issues. Add this to your required reading list.

Listen to this!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I’d read this book in a physical version a year or so ago, but was excited to find it as an audiobook! I love the information presented within and Leila’s writing style. That said, the performance of the material left a little to be desired, with jarring mispronunciations and occasionally stilted delivery.

A solid listen overall

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It flits around to many different topics but doesn't get particularly in depth with any of them. My main problem was the narrator mispronounced things CONSTANTLY

Not what I hoped

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I wish I had read this great book instead of listening to the audiobook. Lachele Carl mispronounces things CONSTANTLY. From Tuskegee Airmen to Tupac.

It’s distracting and frustrating.

Read over audio

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is a book written in first person, where the speaker is American. A Detroit American. Listening to the reader/performer give irregular pronunciations of words like “process,” “patina,” “Louisville,” and “Orleans” was really jarring and detracted from my immersion immensely.

There are some really unique and valuable insights here, particularly about “Strange Fruit” and other perspectives that I found very compelling.

In the discussion of forgotten black cemeteries and chattel slavery, I felt it was perhaps a bit narrow. What can be said of the Black experience, in some of the examples, could be said and worse of the Indigenous experience. It’s not a competition, and the Black experience in these examples are relevant to the discussion, but it was presented a bit like the only experience with these examples.

On the whole, however, a great treatment. Covers a lot of ground effectively. A little more editing would have gone a long way, but still worth the read.

Great insights but falls a little short

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.