The Haunting of the Antebellum South: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s <i>Appropriate</i> as a Gothic Memory Archive
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Appropriate (2014), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins unearths the buried horror of the antebellum South by crafting a story about the white, dysfunctional Lafayettes, who visit their family house in Arkansas for an estate sale. In the process, they discover the secret of their deceased patriarch – that he collected photos and body parts of lynched Black men and women as souvenirs. Following the trend established by American Gothic scholars who read the American house as a metonym for the United States and its haunting entanglement with slavery, this article explores how Appropriate uses specific traits of the genre to critique its racialized conventions, particularly the portrayal of slavery as the haunting “dark” guilt of the past. I read the Lafayette family’s collective obsession with lynched body parts across three generations as a form of Gothic doubling. Furthermore, I explore how Jacobs-Jenkins reveals the Gothic horror of the past through the trope of the unseen and repressed Other – mainly through the sound of cicadas – which emphasizes the dismembered body in active pain rather than frozen and preserved in time. Through these interventions, Jacobs-Jenkins disturbs buried and repressed discourses about transatlantic slavery and white supremacy that still haunt the United States today.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".