Where Racial Meets Neuro Diversity: Pondering “Who’s We” in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines The Intuitionist through the lenses of disability studies to complicate prevailing racial readings of the novel. While I do not dispute the undeniable racial inflections of the school of elevator inspection known as intuitionism, I uncover a less visible “neurodiverse” inflection that Whitehead’s careful characterization of his protagonist’s peculiarly different cognitive style intimates. My reading accounts for Whitehead’s idiosyncratic fascination with material objects—in this case, elevators—which I consider beyond their symbolic or representational dimension. As I demonstrate, the elevators’ very material existence and their peculiar relations with intuitionist inspectors are, in fact, instrumental in Whitehead’s complex depiction of neurodiversity. Drawing on autistic memoir and neuroscientific research on the autism spectrum, I argue that Whitehead links racial and cognitive diversity so as to interrogate exclusivist notions of identity.