Racialized human faces, made with black and brown hides of various hues, shaved and stitched together with bright shiny silver pins, are affixed to the bodies of lions, antelopes, sheep, bears, and coyotes, among other animals. These hybrid taxidermy sculptures by Kate Clark, with their human faces and animal bodies, not only nuzzle the thin fuzzy line between species, bringing the human and the animal into intimate proximity but also breathlessly speak to the historical associations between blackness and animalization. Black American poet Claudia Rankine specially commissioned a taxidermy sculpture by Clark to be photographed and included within her Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), a book-length poem about race and anti-black racism and microaggressions in contemporary America. Donning a taxidermy mask (made by Clark), black hip-hop artist Desiigner transforms into a half-man-half-panda in the music video's final scene for “Panda” (2016). And, in the black horror film Get Out (2017), taxidermy exists in a strange constellation with the main protagonist, Chris Washington, a black man who ultimately weaponizes a taxidermy mount to escape from a veritable house of horrors. Taken together, these examples suggest that taxidermy is enjoying something of a black renaissance. As this chapter will argue, taxidermy is emerging as a constellation that cuts across genres to capture the pervasive horror of black existence.

As the first part of this chapter explores, the long nineteenth century sets the stage for a difficult relation between taxidermy and black bodies. From the nearly forgotten black taxidermist John Edmonstone, who trained Charles Darwin, through the real-life cases of preserved and taxidermied black bodies (of the “Hottentot Venus” and “El Negro”), likely inspiration for the stuffed black man-turned-coatrack in H. G. Wells's Gothic tale “The Triumphs of a Taxidermist” (1894), black bodies have inhabited the world of taxidermy since its golden age—a golden age it shares with the Gothic. And yet now, in our contemporary moment, taxidermy's black bodies have returned to Gothic horror with a vengeance. In the next two parts of this chapter, I focus on two key texts where taxidermy constellates the horror of black existence: Claudia Rankine's genre-bending prose poetry collection Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), which includes a photograph of a specially commissioned taxidermy sculpture by Kate Clark, and the horror film Get Out (2017, dir. Jordan Peele).