African diasporic authors have increasingly challenged the suitability of monsters from European folk and literary traditions as expressions of the complexity of racial subjectivity. Such monsters are pre-loaded with racial and ethnic significations and discourses. Rather, Afro-diasporic authors in general have made a space in their gothic texts for the monsters arising out of Black experience and diasporic folklore. The nuances expressed by such monsters reinterpret the nature of racial difference, oppression and domination. Edgar Mittelholzer's novel My Bones and My Flute, Erna Brodber's novel Myal, and Nalo Hopkinson's ‘Ganger: Ball Lightning’ and ‘Tan-Tan and Dry Bone’ particularly exemplify this practice. Furthermore, the incorporation of folk figures into twentieth-century Black Gothic texts produces narratives haunted by pre-contact histories even as these figures are revised to also reflect the impact of colonial contact and consequent oppression. Contemporary narratives incorporating folkloric monsters such as the bolom and the soucouyant emphasise the endless costs of racialisation, colonialism and its resultant modernity. A duppy may be similar to a ghost, but the devilish history of racial encounter and oppressive modernity is best reflected in its distinct details.

Authors such as Mittelholzer, Brodber and Hopkinson acknowledge the ways that unmediated Western literary genres are inadequate for minority subjects that always exist as an outsider-within among Western nation states. They critique the insidious assaults upon, and erasures of, Black identity and culture which occur in these genres, particularly the gothic. For instance, in Myal Dan and Willie – two African ancestors who possess two of the Jamaican characters in the text – recount the ways the Africanist voice is stolen from racial minorities in predominantly white, Western nations and displaced with oppressive ideologies, noting how in ‘sen[ding] in their message, using our voice’, such nations ‘split man from his self’ to render the oppressed subject ‘a working zombie’ (Brodber 1988, 66–7). The exchange touches upon the explicit nature of neo-colonialism, noting that Western imperialists ‘rule the rulers’ who have no faith in their own people or willingness to act as independent leaders to a sovereign nation. Significantly the two ancestors also comment upon the implicit strategies of neo-colonialism, stating that the false leaders have been duped into betraying their people by notions that they as leaders are enlightened.