Rust Belt Gothik
Framework introduced by cultural journalist Erika Hardison.
Rust Belt Gothik is a Black speculative framework rooted in the industrial Midwest and Rust Belt, where Great Migration histories, environmental pressure, and Black spiritual life activate the Gothik. Haunting is not symbolic — it is structural, inherited, and shaped by industry, segregation, labor collapse, and climate.
Here is an essay I wrote for Reactor where I examined Sinners as a case study to showcase how Rust Belt Gothik shows up in sanctified speculative narratives.
I am, of course, not inventing a new term out of whole cloth; instead, I am naming a framework we’ve all been exposed to but haven’t had the precise language to describe. From my years as a cultural journalist and book reviewer, I often find that quite a lot of Black art gets categorized as “Afrofuturism” simply because it’s easy to do, though these works invite or require greater nuance or specificity. To fully understand a work like Sinners, we need to look beyond the broader umbrella of Afrofuturism to the traditions synthesized, transformed, and reconfigured through the Great Migration into the genre I’m calling Rust Belt Gothik.
This framework is two years in the making.