A left-wing University of Florida professor seeks to convince students that Frankenstein’s monster and other villains of horror literature are actually stand-ins for black Americans.
The College Fix, a conservative website focused on higher education, reported on Monday that UF African American Studies Professor Julia Mollenthiel teaches a course that “interprets the horror genre based on ‘racial identity and oppression.’” The class is entitled “Black Horror, White Terror.”
Mollenthiel also sprinkles her course with materials discussing “whiteness,” “black feminism,” and “queering personhood.”
The main point of her course, according to The Fix, is to explore “the relationship between horror and Black literary modes and traditions focusing on key moments that depict fears of Blackness and/or the terror associated with being Black in America.”
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Students must read classics by 19th-century white authors to study how they have “affected racialized discourses,” the syllabus states.
These include Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and other works. It also includes films such as D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” a 1915 ode to the Ku Klux Klan, and Jordan Peele’s 2017 anti-white comedy “Get Out.”
The syllabus asserts, “No lesson is intended to espouse, promote, advance, inculcate, or compel a particular feeling, perception, viewpoint, or belief,” which appears to pay lip service to Florida’s Stop WOKE Act.
Yet The Fix noted that, as an example, the class reads an academic article arguing that Poe was “haunted” by black people, as shown by his fictional works.
In another example, students would learn how Shelley’s renowned monster “parallels … the racial stereotypes of the age,” which in her case was 1818.
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Students, The Fix added, will also examine how black artists tap into the “horror aesthetic” in order to counter “white constructions of Blackness in the horror/Gothic genre.”
The Fix reported that Mollenthiel refused to respond to requests for comment about her references to “whiteness” and how it is portrayed in the class, as well as a question about the necessity of material on queer sexuality.
David Canton, director of UF’s African American Studies program, also refused to comment on those issues.
The website also reported that Mollenthiel appeared to draw from her work as a graduate student at the University of Miami.
Her dissertation focused on how the horror genre of pop culture was viewed through a racial lens.
“My concept of horrifying whiteness offers an avenue for Black resistance by disrupting the centuries-old whiteness as innocence and blackness as culpability narrative,” she wrote, “and my concept of crippling fear versus empowering fear offers an opportunity to probe the advantages/disadvantages of Black fear.”
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