The Neo-Gothic Imaginary and the Rhetoric of Loss in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

Abstract

The aim of my paper will be to discuss the African-American reworking of the Gothic tradition in Colson Whitehead’s neo-slave narrative. I want to argue that the figure of the protagonist Cora may be seen as the embodiment of losses that span over generations of black women. Cora’s melancholia is a strategy of dealing with the horrors of slavery and a sign of a black woman’s failed entry into the Symbolic. While the novel’s narrative technique is a symbol of the ever-present past that haunts black subjectivity, the underground railroad may be read as a metaphor for the repressed content of American national unconscious.