The Underground Railroad deploys the poetics of what this essay terms “speculative satire” to reconfigure readers' understanding of these histories. While these US states may at first appear to be likewise reimagined spaces, this essay focuses on resonances between the novel's depiction of these places and the real histories of racialized violence that extend beyond emancipation and into the present. This essay considers the effects of the novel's speculative premise in conjunction with its use of satire, focusing on the depictions of the nineteenth-century locations through which Cora moves. Rather than figuring the railroad as a network of people helping Cora move in secret, Whitehead's novel transforms the underground railroad into a real train. I conclude with a discussion of time in Whitehead, arguing that his distinctive engagement with temporality lies at the heart of the vision of freedom after neoliberalism offered by his fiction.Ĭolson Whitehead's 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad, tells the story of an enslaved woman, Cora, attempting to escape a Georgia plantation and make her way to freedom by using the underground railroad. This novel, arriving a decade after Apex, shows Whitehead responding to changes in American society and culture – particularly the advent of Black Lives Matter and a growing public awareness of mass incarceration’s implications for African Americans – that seem to call for a more sincere reckoning with the notion of freedom. The Underground Railroad, by contrast, inhabits an African American literary genre – the novel of slavery – that is strongly wedded to discourses of bondage and freedom. The novel both pursues and treats critically a postmodern aesthetics that envisages symbolic action on language as the primary ground of politics. I argue that in Apex – published against the background of the Bush doctrine and the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – Whitehead treats freedom ironically. I then undertake an extended comparison between Whitehead’s novels Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) and The Underground Railroad (2016).

I begin by outlining some of the significations of “freedom” within American culture before and during the period of neoliberal hegemony, placing particular emphasis on trends in the word’s provenance for African Americans between the civil rights era and the time in which Whitehead is writing.

This essay explores the changing role played by the idea of freedom in the fiction of Colson Whitehead.

The underground railroad colson