In Atlantics ( Mati Diop, 2019 ) and Nanny (Nikyatu Jusu, 2022) nature operates as a metaphor catalysed by the social and structural human monstrosities populating the ‘modern’ landscape that prey upon black migrant bodies. This paper seeks to explore how Atlantics and Nanny construct tales of black horror and love to explore the intimate yet ancient entwining of nature and the black body in their voicelessness and marginalisation, and the need for transformation in order to survive in a modern world. Writer Gary Snyder famously remarked that narratives are one type of trace that humans leave on the earth, and in both Atlantics and Nanny, oral stories and storytelling bleed into horrific expressions of nature that sink into black bodies and demand to be heard. Little critical work has been done on the role of nature and the sensory in New Black Horror as an ethical call. Films like Atlantics and Nanny centre water and the non-human as active protagonists, introducing animistic folk figures, languages and traditions from the African diaspora to critically engage with black exploitation and labor practices, double consciousness, and loss in a globalised world. The activation of Gothic caught in interplay with the natural world, as an approach to countering white narratives and structures of vision in cinema, continues the work of presenting alternative stories, scathing criticisms, and examinations of black bodies as they struggle to escape the continued net of white cinematic representations and postcolonial gazing. At stake is a rethinking of black eco-horror and the different roles that nature can offer in cinematic texts, particularly as central to black authorship of one’s own story, and reconceptualising of future self in an everchanging and environmentally endangered world.
Candice Wilson (Wed,) studied this question.