Tananarive Due is an author and University of California Los Angeles college professor with an unabashed reverence for Jordan Peele’s racial horror film ‘Get Out.’
This fall, Due will be providing UCLA students with some formal schooling on the sunken place with her course titled, “The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival, and Black Horror Aesthetic.”
The Afrofuturist professor spoke with Gizmodo about her new course for an article published on Wednesday.
“I love horror,” Due said. “But it never dawned on me that I could have a black horror course before Get Out. When a movie like that comes along, you now have a reference point to talk about everything that has come before. [“The Sunken Place”] is going to be a black horror overview course that will be very cinema-based. It’ll look at cinema going back to the ’30s.”
Due, a former reporter for The Miami Herald and daughter of a civil rights lawyer told Gizmodo that she also plans to cover other black films like Birth Of A Nation, Tales From The Hood and Blacula throughout her class.
“Horror is a great way to address this awful, festering wound in the American psyche, the slavery and genocide that was present during our nation’s birth,” she continued. “We has a nation have not been able to process it in a healthy way, or anything close to a healthy way.”
Due’s “Sunken Place” course will begin awakening UCLA students on September 28th.
