Tracking the Slave Narrative in Colson Whitehead’s

Abstract

Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, The Underground Railroad (2016) is a take on both the slave narratives of the 19th century and the “neo-slave narratives” of the late 20th century. It mimics these genres’ ambivalence towards the core American belief in the pursuit of happiness: flight is the protagonist Cora’s pursuit of happiness in the face of the contradictions of the American promise. But happy endings remain elusive: all temptations to stay and find contentment in waystations are revealed to be illusory. Moreover, the text veers away onto the territory of fictive history. The Underground Railroad is a literal subterranean railway network, and each visited State allegorizes possible ways to deal with race in America, in a wide spectrum that ranges from—deceptive—utopia to Fascist nightmare. The freedoms taken with history and the original genres amount to a pursuit of literary pleasure which has sometimes been associated with a “post-Black” aesthetic. If the latter does not attempt to neglect the racial question in American culture, but to imagine more diverse ways of articulating African American artistic expressions and identities, Railroad may find its place in such a movement, as it prolongs, through imagination and satire, the work of symbolic resilience and political involvement of the 19th-century originals.