The Underground Railroad Colson Whitehead
166976854
Genre Trouble and History's Miseries in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad
Every novel by Colson Whitehead is an affront to genre. Critics most often describe his books as hybrid forms, as if by naming all their literary frames the essence of these by turn brilliant and frustrating books might be captured. The Intuitionist (1999) is a detective story with film noir valences wrapped around a passing narrative. Zone One (2011) is an incisive cultural critique slumming as a zombie apocalypse novel. For Whitehead, generic conventions are established only to be subverted or discarded. Whitehead admitted his playful approach to literary genres in a 2013 interview with Nikesh Shukla that touched on his fifth book, Sag Harbor (2009) "That novel is my take on a traditionally realist genre, the coming of age novel. I was wearing realist drag in the same way that I have worn detective drag or horror drag in my other books" "Colson" Whitehead explains that he wears such literary drag in order to deny "narrative satisfaction" and refuse the repetition and predictability that comes with generic forms. By presenting genre as a form of drag, Whitehead affirms the performative nature of the cultural codes that instantiate literary categories. If, as Judith Butler explains, the drag queen exposes gender as a social construction built on imitation and repetition, then genre too establishes expectations that lack any essential truth. Just as drag queens cause "gender trouble," Whitehead's literary drag instills in readers and critics alike a good deal of genre trouble. The stakes of this genre trouble raise significantly when a novel's villains are not the walking dead but slave masters and their racist enablers. Romance and mystery may be costumes worn and paraded to comic and critical effect, but stories about human bondage derive from authentic experiences, real bodies tortured and raped, real battles won and lost, which means that generic considerations of Whitehead's critically acclaimed The Underground Railroad (2016) are inextricable from the grounds of history. What are we to call this puzzling text? It is deeply if anachronistically historicized but also animated by a governing conceit, the literalization of the Underground Railroad, that flaunts any
Stephanie Li
203450549
THE STRUGGLE OF THE MAIN CHARACTER TO OBTAIN FREEDOM IN COLSON WHITEHEAD'S THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
A bstract This research, is an analysis on the main character's struggle to obtain her freedom based on The Underground Railroad a novel by Colson Whitehead. The purpose of this research aims at the displaying modes of oppressions that the main character has to undergo as a dark skinned slave secretly trying to find ways to escape. The data are analyzed with qualitative descriptive analysis method involving the intrinsic aspects and the theory of forms of oppression by Iris Young. In support of this study, library research technique is used for additional sources. The research results in the identification that the main character has to undergo fivefaces of oppression: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialsm, and violence. Eventually, it turns out that both internal and external factors have brought her a success in escaping from slavery and in winning her freedom. Keywords black skinned, freedom, oppression, slavery
Shifa Fauziah P ShitaDewiRatih Ade S Natawiria
198620027
Racial Prejudice And The Main Character's Response Towards It In Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad Novel
The aim of this study was to describe the issues of racial prejudice that occur in The Underground Railroad novel by Colson Whitehead which was published in 2016. This study concerned on the depiction of racial prejudice that happen in the novel. This study used a qualitative method and the data sources were taken from the narratives and the dialogues of The Underground Railroad novel. The theory of racial prejudice from Gordon W. Allport was applied in this study. Moreover, the purpose of this study was to find the response from the society, especially from the main character towards racial prejudice. The result of this study showed that racial prejudice was all about human behavior in terms of treating others unfairly. In addition, racial prejudice became a complex problem that difficult to avoid from social life Keywords: Racial Prejudice, Response.
198601863
Continuing Conjure: African Based Spiritual Traditions in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing
In 2016 and 2017, Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing both won the National Book Award for fiction, the first time that two African American writers have won the award in consecutive years. This article argues that both novels invoke African based spirituality in order to create literary sites of resistance both within the narrative of the respective novels, but also within American culture at large. By drawing on a tradition of authors using African based spiritual practices, particularly Voodoo, hoodoo, conjure and rootwork, Whitehead and Ward enter and engage in a tradition of African American protest literature based on African spiritual traditions, and use these traditions variously, both as a tie to an originary African identity, but also as protection and a locus of resistance to an oppressive society. That the characters within the novels engage in African spiritual traditions as a means of locating a sense of "home" within an oppressive white world, despite the novels being set centuries apart, shows that these traditions provide a possibility for empowerment and protest and can act as a means for contemporary readers to address their own political and social concerns.
Religions
James Mellis
219838907
Riding the Rails to (Un)Freedom: Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad
This novel about US black slavery departs from realism, moving around in time and space as a means of dealing with different racial terrors in different historical periods. One of the author's intentions is to make us think about slavery not just in the past but with reverberations for the present. Published in 2016, the novel resonates with a contemporary America characterized by acrimonious racial division. After escaping from a Georgia plantation through a literalized Underground Railroad, the adolescent female protagonist soon learns that freedom remains elusive in states further north, even those where slavery has been abolished. The novel fuses the odyssey of Cora with the history and mythology of America, and asserts the inseparability of slavery from American capitalism and the building of empire. Cora explores both the Declaration of Independence and the Bible, two foundational texts of the nation, in a novel that addresses some of the foundational sins of America. Hers is the all American story of escape to freedom, but her journey takes her through ever darker varieties of depredation and oppression. She becomes an American dreamer in the sense that she never accepts her place in a system that she persists in defying, and through this process becomes a fictional representation of black people who, with their relentless pursuit of freedom, contributed so greatly to the building of American democracy.
Polish Journal for American Studies
Constante Gonzalez Groba
197741686
Post racial Discourse and the Biopolitics of Race: Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad
The New Korean Journal of English Lnaguage Literature
212953194
METAPHORICAL EXPRESSIONS IN CORA'S PURSUIT OF FREEDOM FROM RACISM AND SLAVERY IN COLSON WHITEHEAD'S THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
Ria Destya Ningrum
203297587
Lesson Plan For Teaching Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad"
Amelia Tomei Peter Schmidt
219897353
The Neo Gothic Imaginary and the Rhetoric of Loss in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad
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.
Polish Journal for American Studies
Patrycja Antoszek
217008266
THE MATRIX OF DOMINATION, CONTROLLING IMAGES AND JOURNEY OF SELF DEFINITION AS PORTRAYED IN COLSON WHITEHEAD'S THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD: BLACK FEMINIST CRITICISM
This study examines African American women's experience as portrayed in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016) through intersectional perspective. The novel tells a story about the life of a female slave in American southern plantation named Cora, and her survival as fugitive slave in order to gain her freedom. Using Patricia Hill Collins' concept of intersectionality, this study aims to identify the ways matrix of domination in a given society constitute and maintain African American women's intersecting oppressions and also to investigate the women's responses, including Cora as the protagonist. Centering on the protagonist, this study also aims to analyze the journey of self definition as a mean of resistance toward the matrix of domination. This study uses qualitative descriptive approach, and applies Collins' three basic tenets of intersectionality, namely Matrix of Domination, Controlling Images, and Self definition. The findings of this study revealed that matrix of domination indeed organizes and maintains social imbalance in many aspects, including gender, race, and class, for the sake of dominant group. Besides, the study showed that, despite the same objectives, different society may hold different implementations of matrix of domination. Through self empowerment and personal development, a journey of self definition from victimization to free state of mind is fundamental for African American women to overcome their intersecting oppressions.
Teguh Nurrohman