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Beyond Afrofuturism: Sinners, the Great Migration, and Rust Belt Gothik
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Sinners
Beyond Afrofuturism: Sinners, the Great Migration, and Rust Belt Gothik
“Sinners” is a particular kind of story about migration, spirituality, and Black speculative survival skills
By Erika Hardison
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Published on March 10, 2026
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
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Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
With Sinners being hailed as a masterpiece and taking a well-deserved victory lap at various awards ceremonies, I think it’s time to expand how we think and talk about the film itself. “Chicago ain’t shit but Mississippi with tall ass buildings” is what the Smokestack twins say to their cousin Sammie when he asks them about the big city. In that moment, Sammie can’t imagine anything worse than staying in the Delta, living in a shack under his religious father’s rules, and being a sharecropper working the cotton fields.
Sammie’s experiences serve as a symbolic origin story for musicians like Buddy Guy (who portrays an older version of Sammie at the end of the film), bridging the blues and Black spirituality through the Great Migration and the hauntings that await in the big cities to the North. Sammie’s character also echoes the life of Delta blues legend Robert Johnson, who many believed sold his soul to the devil to become the greatest bluesman in history. Whether such legends are true or not, the framework remains the same. Black music and ancestral practices were never forgotten or lost as Black populations shifted geographically—but they were exposed to different pressures in the colder, Northern cities.
The Smokestack twins returned from Chicago colder than they were when they returned from war. In the scene where Stack, who has been turned into a vampire, tries to convince Smoke to let him back into the juke joint, he reminds his brother through the locked door that “they’ve been in the trenches together,” referring not just to Germany’s battlefields but to Chicago gangways.
The twins’ transformation is boldly unapologetic. In Mississippi, locals wear overalls and often go barefoot as they work the fields. When Smoke and Stack arrive with slightly conked hair, gangsta-style, tailored suits that epitomize Black dandyism, and a flashy new car, everyone notices. With gold-plated guns and weaponry, the twins are viewed as cold-blooded gangsters and that’s because the pressures and tensions experienced during their time in Chicago have forged them into this new form.
Coogler went on record, saying, “Sinners is a Chicago movie.” And even though we never see the city, it is an undeniable main character. Sammie’s infatuation with Chicago is the seed of Afrofuturism. But Afrofuturism alone doesn’t account for what happens to Sammie when he leaves the South for Chicago, nor does it describe what Smoke and Stack were up to for almost a decade with Al Capone and the Irish Mob. In both cases, their dreams and ambitions met Northern industrial reality. Rust Belt Gothik isn’t a rejection of Afrofuturism; instead, it’s Afrofuturism compressed under the Great Lakes frost. It’s what happens when the utopian imagination collides with the realities of redlining, gangways, hauntings, and factories that promised freedom but delivered industrialized segregation.
I am, of course, not inventing a new term out of whole cloth; instead, I am naming a framework we’ve all been exposed to but haven’t had the precise language to describe. From my years as a cultural journalist and book reviewer, I often find that quite a lot of Black art gets categorized as “Afrofuturism” simply because it’s easy to do, though these works invite or require greater nuance or specificity. To fully understand a work like Sinners, we need to look beyond the broader umbrella of Afrofuturism to the traditions synthesized, transformed, and reconfigured through the Great Migration into the genre I’m calling Rust Belt Gothik.
Defining Rust Belt Gothik
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
On the Sinners: In Proximity podcast on HBO Max, Coogler explains that the film is “supernatural, but it’s not.” That description is key to understanding Rust Belt Gothik—spelled intentionally with a “k” to distinguish it from white Southern Gothic and to emphasize its lineage across Black mediums, storytelling and regions, similar to the use of “Amerikkka” when critiquing systemic structures in American politics.
The common understanding of “Rust Belt Gothic” has previously been used to describe a Eurocentric aesthetic or an overall vibe. With Rust Belt Gothik, it’s describing a specific type of narrative: one that’s rooted in Black survival under industrial systems. Rust Belt Gothik is Afrofuturism under frost. It’s activated when hauntings, both figuratively and literally, encounter Black spiritual inheritance practices and systems that were carried from the South via the Great Migration. In the context of storytelling, Rust Belt Gothik operates as a set of Black speculative survival skills forged in response to the pressures of migration, racialized geography, and industrialized segregation.
Chicago-based Afrofuturist scholar Ytasha Womack noticed that Afrofuturism “wasn’t intersecting Chicago” and lacked Midwest references beyond Detroit techno. She realized this gap was “tied to a specific great migration experience,” particularly her own Chicago upbringing, which she acknowledged is shaped by Great Migration institutions, fortitude, and perceptions. “It doesn’t mean one is better or not,” Womack notes, “but it’s a different relationship to space, place and vision.” That difference is what Rust Belt Gothik articulates. Womack describes the Great Migration itself as a transformative rupture: “Many people came up through the Great Migration. Leaving the Deep South and coming to a place like Chicago is literally like going from Earth to Mars.”
The Great Migration was like moving from Earth to Mars
Decades before we started incorporating “Afrofuturism” into our critical and cultural lexicon, writer and poet Henry Dumas laid the groundwork with his work that celebrated and explored Black spirituality and framed Black migration as a rupture than can impact the mind, body and spirit of Black people. These aspects of his work led Toni Morrison to refer to him as a genius, and her own work was heavily influenced by his writing. Echoing Dumas’ earlier work, Womack also reminds us that the Great Migration wasn’t only about relocation but also sensory dislocation and spatial rupture. The air, weather and density all changed, all of which is reflected in the Smokestack twins’ physical and mental attitudes and behaviors.
Chicago was supposed to be the dream waiting after the South. That’s Afrofuturism in practice, an early exercise in envisioning newly possible Black futures. Instead, the Great Migration became the labor engine for Northern industrialization, where Black labor fed the factories and mills under frigid capitalist structures designed to freeze and break newly settled souls. That’s the kind of Gothik you can’t cosplay or erase. It’s the frost that reshapes the spirit, mind and body. For these reasons, we must consider Beloved by Toni Morrison as a foundational literary text in this framework. Morrison showed us that even when we believe we are free, we can still be haunted.
Rust Belt Gothik doesn’t celebrate the arrival; it describes the costs of surviving under the weight of all that steel and concrete, on the cold shores of the Great Lakes. Both before and after the Great Migration, Black spirituality serves as an operational infrastructure, even for non-believers. In Sinners, it’s Sammie’s father’s church… but it’s also the nightclub where an elderly Sammie, now played by Buddy Guy, still performs decades later.
Sammie is shocked to learn that his guitar was previously owned by Charley Patton, another notable Delta blues songwriter and musician. In that moment, you can see Sammie’s eyes widen as he seemingly can feel the connection, the cosmic powers beaming from his stringed instrument.
The cosmic is inside of us
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
Sinners uses music as a technology that operates like a spiritual portal between the living and dead, through which Sammie unknowingly summons the vampire Remmick, who is drawn to his music. But before he ever meets Remmick or rides into town with his twin cousins, word is already traveling around the plantation that he has a musical gift.
When exploring the mystical elements of Rust Belt Gothik and Sinners, NAACP and Eisner Award-winning comics creator and scholar John Jennings looks to Afrofuturist jazz musician and poet Sun Ra for answers, explaining that Sun Ra believed that the cosmic is inside of us. Jennings also notes that “the outer space is cool, but also the interspace is where we actually find growth.” Furthermore, Jennings points out that cosmic concepts in speculative fiction land differently for Black storytellers. “When you look at Lovecraft’s work and he’s talking about the cosmic, he’s talking about something indescribable. But when we talk about the cosmic, we’re talking about something that is us. We are the cosmic.”
Jennings acknowledges his personal connection to the Great Migration, and notes how the Black Rust Belt can show up in comics and other media. He notes that when works like Sinners and other stories that grow out of post-Migration culture are discussed solely in terms of Afrofuturism, a plethora of nuances get lost and the richness of Black Rust Belt culture becomes flattened, diminished. As a second-generation Great Migration descendant myself, Jennings’ concerns resonate strongly with me; I can’t overstate how imperative it is that history and culture of the Black Rust Belt—the second-largest population of Black Americans (with the South being the first)—be recognized and understood in its own right.
The geography of the Black Rust Belt reshapes Black futures and possibilities
Reynaldo Anderson, associate professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and coeditor of Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, frames the Rust Belt Gothik as “the afterlife of migration”—not as a promise, but the results that come after the promise hardens into technofeudalism.
Anderson points out that data centers will replace factories. Detention logic shapes contemporary Black life. But Anderson argues that this geography reshapes Black futurity differently: “African agency or futurity emerges from damage, not absence” and “Black life doesn’t need utopia to be visionary.” That’s how a character like Sammie becomes a legend like Buddy Guy—evolving through the pressure, not despite it.
In Sinners, Ryan Coogler crafts his origin story, and now Buddy Guy stands as the embodiment of Rust Belt Gothik: electric, loud, Chicago-forged, unfuckwitable. He’s a walking archive and the prototype of what happens when Southern Black spirituality meets Great Lakes industrial pressure. He’s not in the distant future. He’s now. And the future he represents is gridiron-paved, ancestor-led, transforming us into cosmic urban myths. Buddy Guy is a superhero, in the same way Benjamin Sisko is. Destiny can’t be denied.[end-mark]
Further Reading
Goodbye, Sweetwater by Henry Dumas
Beloved was already mentioned in the essay above, so it’s fitting to list one of the writers who inspired Toni Morrison with a distinctive blend of Black spirituality, fabulism, migration culture and rhythmic prose that examined and critiqued race and politics as shaped through the Black Arts Movement. It’s telling that Amiri Baraka originally coined the term “Afro-surreal” to describe Dumas’ work.
Silver Surfer by John Jennings
A cosmic spin on Rust Belt Gothik Cosmic meets the Great Migration sound in this graphic novel, where the blues activate technology, memory and self-defense against extra-territorial forces in this fictional Rust Belt town of Sweetwater that mirrors Buffalo, New York.
BTTM FDDRS by Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore
This graphic novel shows the aftermath of declining manufacturing pressures that resulted in uprooting generational Black families on the South Side of Chicago, using gentrification as a horror that modernizes Rust Belt Gothik into a post-industrial racial geography landscape.
The Turner House by Angela Flournoy
Blending Great Migration Spirituality and Rust Belt Gothik ancestral hauntings, this story follows a Detroit family that consists of 13 siblings who must confront their family’s past, present, and future as the eldest is revisited by a haint from his youth.
Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston
Travel with an unlikely duo from the swamps of Georgia to the mystical and unlimited opportunities that await them in Chicago, where magic evolves as a Black woman crosses paths with a half-Indigenous, half-Irish man who both hold onto past traumas as they navigate the theater scene in fabulist fashion.
The Edge of Yesterday by Rita Woods
This upcoming novel is a heartbreaking mix of time-traveling through an authentic Great Migration lens, allowing readers to envision themselves in a Great Depression Era Detroit, with a heartbreaking star-crossed lovers theme where their crossed paths begin to rip time.
Ours by Phillip B. Williams
Rust Belt Gothik Spirituality functions as technology and protection, where a fearless woman named Saint travels across the South, freeing enslaved people and founding a town named Ours, making them invisible to white people who wish to destroy them.
Icon: A Hero’s Welcome by Dwayne McDuffie
Detroit-born Dwayne McDuffie and the entire Milestone Media introduced the world to Dakota, a fictitious post-industrial Midwestern, Great Lakes city where Rust Belt Gothik is activated by industrialization, environmental racism, redlining, and monsters who live in the dark shadows and in local politics.
The post Beyond Afrofuturism: <i>Sinners</i>, the Great Migration, and Rust Belt Gothik appeared first on Reactor.
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