The Divine Thread: Social Minds, Community, and Race in The Underground Railroad

Abstract

In opposition to individualist readings of the novel, this essay explores the roles of collective psychology and narrative method in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. Beginning with a survey of the critical claim that Whitehead’s text fails to explore the texture of enslaved life under white supremacy, it proceeds into an analysis of TUR’s place within Whitehead’s oeuvre and in terms of the neo-slave narrative and speculative realist genres. Having unpacked the differences and continuities between the style of TUR and the author’s earlier works, the essay then advances its larger claim that Whitehead’s attention to group psychology and intermental focalization creates a narrative style to match the “racial logic” of the American slave system. With the ideological and social valences of that “logic” among the novel’s white characters in place, the essay then tracks the counterpart representations among the black communities of The Underground Railroad and provides an account of how Whitehead employs various forms of irony to anatomize individual and collective life under a white-supremacist system. The piece concludes with a discussion of how this mode of reading bears on the wider genre of speculative realism overall.