Episode 29: Us

We reflect on Jordan Peele’s new thriller

Harvard Ash Center
This Week in Dystopia
2 min readApr 2, 2019

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Jordan Peele may fear his doppelgänger, but he isn’t afraid of melding horror with social commentary.

Us, Peele’s new thriller, hit theatres on March 22nd and we’ve been talking about it ever since. The film left fans with questions, theories and lots of thoughts. This week, Kinitra Brooks, Hutchins Fellow at Harvard University and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, The Lemonade Reader (yes, that Lemonade!), joins host Chris Robichaud to talk about the movie.

🚨 SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t already seen Us, listen at the peril of your movie-going experience. Better yet, go see the film and come right back to this episode!

This Week’s Guest: Kinitra Brooks

🐦 @k8dee16

🌐 www.kinitradbrooks.com

Kinitra Brooks is the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Professor Brooks specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture. She currently has two books in print: Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror (Rutgers UP 2017), a critical treatment of black women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror and Sycorax’s Daughters (Cedar Grove Publishing 2017), a volume of short horror fiction written by black women co-edited with Linda Addison and Susana Morris. Her current research focuses on portrayals of the Conjure Woman in popular culture.

As the Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow for the 2018–2019 academic year, she is working on The Conjure Woman’s Garden: Black Women’s Rootworking Traditions.

Want more?

Check out these articles authored by and featuring Kinitra:

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This podcast is produced by Harvard Ash Center.

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Harvard Ash Center
This Week in Dystopia

Research center and think tank at Harvard Kennedy School. Here to talk about democracy, government innovation, and Asia public policy.