<p>For all the scholarship devoted to Mary Shelley's English novel <I>Frankenstein</I>, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to its role in American culture, and virtually none to its racial resonances in the United States. In <b>Black Frankenstein</b>, Elizabeth Young identifies and interprets the figure of a black American Frankenstein monster as it appears with surprising frequency throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture, in fiction, film, essays, oratory, painting, and other media, and in works by both whites and African Americans.</p><p>Black Frankenstein stories, Young argues, effect four kinds of racial critique: they humanize the slave; they explain, if not justify, black violence; they condemn the slaveowner; and they expose the instability of white power. The black Frankenstein's monster has served as a powerful metaphor for reinforcing racial hierarchy?and as an even more powerful metaphor for shaping anti-racist critique. Illuminating the power of parody and reappropriation, <b>Black Frankenstein</b> tells the story of a metaphor that continues to matter to literature, culture, aesthetics, and politics.</p>