TY - CHAP
T1 - “The direction of the bizarre”
T2 - Reimagining History in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad
AU - Weiner, Sonia
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - In Colson Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad (2016), the past and the present are interconnected by means of a two-way (rail)road. Whitehead takes his readers on imaginative thought-routes, as well-established literary, historical, and geographic territories veer peculiarly off-course, destabilizing and scrutinizing the known and familiar. By linking what literary critic Ramón Saldívar has called “the fantasy of the imaginary” with “the real of history,” Whitehead creates a literal and metaphorical underground railroad that takes us, as one character says, “to places we know and those we don’t.” By employing the speculative underground railroad as the central metaphor for his novel, Whitehead signals his readiness to challenge the myths surrounding it. He does so by turning to the fantastic, the imaginary and the anachronistic, raising thereby questions concerning ‘reliability’ and ‘authenticity,’ which have become pertinent in Trump’s post-truth America. Using the example of Whitehead’s ‘Museum of Natural Wonders,’ this chapter examines Whitehead’s dialogue with P.T. Barnum, Joice Heth and the disconcerting overlap between science and popular culture, to suggest that integrity is located not in the verisimilitude of the representation of the past, but rather (following Michel Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past) in the nature of its encounter with the present.
AB - In Colson Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad (2016), the past and the present are interconnected by means of a two-way (rail)road. Whitehead takes his readers on imaginative thought-routes, as well-established literary, historical, and geographic territories veer peculiarly off-course, destabilizing and scrutinizing the known and familiar. By linking what literary critic Ramón Saldívar has called “the fantasy of the imaginary” with “the real of history,” Whitehead creates a literal and metaphorical underground railroad that takes us, as one character says, “to places we know and those we don’t.” By employing the speculative underground railroad as the central metaphor for his novel, Whitehead signals his readiness to challenge the myths surrounding it. He does so by turning to the fantastic, the imaginary and the anachronistic, raising thereby questions concerning ‘reliability’ and ‘authenticity,’ which have become pertinent in Trump’s post-truth America. Using the example of Whitehead’s ‘Museum of Natural Wonders,’ this chapter examines Whitehead’s dialogue with P.T. Barnum, Joice Heth and the disconcerting overlap between science and popular culture, to suggest that integrity is located not in the verisimilitude of the representation of the past, but rather (following Michel Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past) in the nature of its encounter with the present.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85136787753&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-73858-7_7
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-73858-7_7
M3 - ???researchoutput.researchoutputtypes.contributiontobookanthology.chapter???
AN - SCOPUS:85136787753
T3 - American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
SP - 159
EP - 181
BT - American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
PB - Palgrave Macmillan
ER -