The Underground Railroad (2016) as Anti-White-Supremacist Fantasy
Abstract
The possibilities the fantastical genre offers for commenting on the reverberations of the United States’ colonial heritage have been exploited extensively in contemporary narrative works. One example is Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), in which he employs Toni Morrison’s concept of the Africanist presence in the realm of the fantastic to show how the stereotypical image of a “Black other” still haunts the White American imagination. Situating Whitehead’s bestseller within the field of Critical Whiteness Studies, this article examines how the fantastical encounter with the “Black other” comments on the image’s persistence in American society and on its function to maintain White supremacy.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
