(Evie Shockley - English) I propose a paper building on my current work on what I call "gothic homelessness," which describes the condition of people who, like African Americans, are marginalized, disempowered, and underresourced by society's powerbrokers' use of domestic ideology.  I look at the ways aspects of our identities -- race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality, in particular -- are constructed literally and metaphorically in terms of understandings of "family" and "home."  These concepts -- and their unjust application to African Americans -- haunt blacks in the U.S. and this haunted state -- this "gothic homelessness" -- is marked in literature through the use of gothic tropes and metaphors by authors ranging from Toni Morrison to Ralph Ellison to Frederick Douglass.  My work enables us to "read" the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans as another instance of "gothic homelessness."