In the past few years, the term Afro-Gothic has begun to move from the informal academic language of university hallways and conference rooms into the lexicon of literary critics and writers. In scholarly circles, the formulation follows from the continuous expansion of Gothic studies over the past two decades, particularly into the fast-growing areas of imperial, African-American, and postcolonial Gothic. But along with the analytic possibilities that the term Afro-Gothic opens up come signiicant catches. On the one hand, Afro-Gothic may help draw meaningful connections between the literatures of Africa and its diaspora, as a new lens through which to view shared representations of the unheimlich nature of legacies of colonial and racial oppression and with which to consider common religio-spiritual topographies. 1 On the other hand, the Afro-Gothic compound invokes Eurocentric racist writing as it raises the specter of the “Dark Continent” of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its “horror.” As such, the term attracts not only scholarly skepticism, but aversion. Tracing the term’s trajectory from its literary historical roots in the British and American Gothic traditions, one becomes disquietingly aware of the extent to which Gothic blackness carries, in some canonical and many popular texts, a speciically racialized referent. One is equally struck, though, by Gothic’s tendency toward self-conscious and parodic writing, which seeks to expose subordinating and constricting structures of power. Where African-American and African writers have responded to both of these inlections with Gothic adaptations, recent South African dramatists have labelled their adaptations Afro-Gothic. The few literary critics and playwrights who have used Afro-Gothic have done so in a way that mirrors the dividing uncertainty over the term’s meaning. As far back as 1992, Timothy Weiss labeled V.S. Naipaul’s 1970s novels “Afro-Gothic” to classify a neo-colonial discursive mode of denigrating Africa and Africans, a terminological use that Laurence Wright seems to reinforce in a 2009 interview where he names the “atmosphere” of Brett Bailey’s play The Prophet (1999) “Afro-gothic.” Yet the playwrights who have applied the term to their own work overturn such representations with plays whose conventions align with those of postcolonial Gothic. Juliet Jenkin and Frances Slabolepszy’s irst advertising blurb for their comedy Afro-Gothic: Testing the Term in South African Theater Esther de Bruijn University of Toronto Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Vol. 1 No. 1 2013