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REFLECTIONS ON LARB SHERI-MARIE HARRISON
M
y partner has a habit of Googling my name to see where in the world my words are popping up. When he notices a new citation, he texts me an image or link of where I’m quoted. The only thing that circulates more widely than my work on Marlon James is “New Black Gothic.” Indeed, many discover my scholarship on Marlon James after encountering this essay. I am glad no one discouraged me from publishing it in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Academia can be weird like that; in some circles there is disdain for public venues, because supposedly, they lack the necessary prestige to be taken seriously as repositories for scholarship. A colleague told me once she was discouraged by a mentor from publishing in LARB for fear of damaging her brand as a serious scholar. Another demurred my congratulations on her newly published review even as she lauded the pleasures of publishing public scholarship that this venue affords. As an immigrant woman of color scholar, who works primarily on minoritized topics, one can’t be entirely dismissive of professional proscriptions concerning seriousness. Meanwhile, this essay is cited in the third volume of The Cambridge History of the Gothic. We made Gothic history, y’all! Cambridge said so. Markers of academic prestige and merit aside, this essay began in a graduate seminar, where one of my students’ observations about the Southern Gothic elements of Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing sparked something in my brain that made me conscious of an aesthetic terrain, across multiple media, that I had been tracking unknowingly for a while. It was the last seminar meeting of the semester; that weekend Donald Glover was host and musical guest on SNL. And since these things tend to come in threes, Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” video premiered that night too, after 153
