Us: Empire and the Thread of Black Femininity

Unlike Get Out, whose plot twists provided some of the film’s shock, the trailers for Us foreground the film’s conceit: a family comes home from a day at the beach to find murderous doubles in their home. While the film complicates this reveal, the sense of dread that the film activates—comes not from suspense but from its mobilization of the uncanny. Even before the doppelgangers are introduced, the film—especially upon repeat viewing—percolates with the sense that something is amiss. Bringing the unruly sensations of the uncanny to bear on Jordan Peele's Us allows us to see how horror makes especially evident the United States as Imperial formation and the numerous ways that Black femininity is presented as threat.

Amber Jamilla Musser is professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Professor Musser writes and researches at the intersections of race, sexuality, and aesthetics. In addition to writing art reviews for The Brooklyn Rail. She has published widely in queer studies, black feminism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024). Her collaborative projects include co-editing Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press, 2021); special issues of Signs: A Journal of Feminist Theory on "Care and Its Complexities" and ASAP Journal on "Queer Form;" and the series Elements in Feminism and Critical Theory for Cambridge University Press. She also serves on the editorial collective for Social Text and is a past president for ASAP (Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present) where she co-chaired ASAP-14: Arts of Fugitivity in Seattle and ASAP-15: Not a Luxury in New York City. She has an AB in Biology and History of Science from Harvard, an M.St in Women’s Studies from Oxford, and a PhD in History of Science from Harvard.

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