Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics
- The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Ideologies and Movements
- Part II The Politics of Genre and Form
- Part III Case Studies
- Chapter 15 Herland (1915): Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- Chapter 16 It Can’t Happen Here (1935): Sinclair Lewis
- Chapter 17 All the King’s Men (1946): Robert Penn Warren
- Chapter 18 Invisible Man (1952): Ralph Ellison
- Chapter 19 The Left Hand of Darkness (1969): Ursula K. Le Guin
- Chapter 20 If Beale Street Could Talk (1974): James Baldwin
- Chapter 21 The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975): Edward Abbey
- Chapter 22 Ceremony (1977): Leslie Marmon Silko
- Chapter 23 Parable Series (1993, 1998): Octavia E. Butler
- Chapter 24 The Underground Railroad (2016): Colson Whitehead
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Chapter 24 - The Underground Railroad (2016): Colson Whitehead
from Part III - Case Studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2023
- The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics
- The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Ideologies and Movements
- Part II The Politics of Genre and Form
- Part III Case Studies
- Chapter 15 Herland (1915): Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- Chapter 16 It Can’t Happen Here (1935): Sinclair Lewis
- Chapter 17 All the King’s Men (1946): Robert Penn Warren
- Chapter 18 Invisible Man (1952): Ralph Ellison
- Chapter 19 The Left Hand of Darkness (1969): Ursula K. Le Guin
- Chapter 20 If Beale Street Could Talk (1974): James Baldwin
- Chapter 21 The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975): Edward Abbey
- Chapter 22 Ceremony (1977): Leslie Marmon Silko
- Chapter 23 Parable Series (1993, 1998): Octavia E. Butler
- Chapter 24 The Underground Railroad (2016): Colson Whitehead
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
This chapter reads Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad as a Janus-faced text in American literary history that looks back toward the persistent political conundrums illuminated by twentieth-century American fiction and reconfigures them in generative ways for the twenty-first century. Like earlier twentieth-century neo-slave narratives by Ishmael Reed, Octavia E. Butler, and Toni Morrison, Whitehead’s novel critiques a naïve historical story of inevitable Black progress, and it even flirts with the notion that American democracy and African American oppression are inextricable. But Whitehead rejects fatalistic narratives of inevitable injustice by showing how American normative myths can still be politically efficacious. Establishing himself as a key literary figure in contemporary Black political thought, Whitehead uses the speculative fiction genre to transform celebrated concepts in American political theory – e.g., individual freedom, legal equality, constitutional rights, representative democracy, popular sovereignty – by contextualizing them within Black experiences across time. Ultimately, his political vision amounts to a wary optimism, which Whitehead himself has called a politics of “impossible hope.”
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023