Writing the future in the work of Colson Whitehead

This thesis is focused on the idea of writing the future in the work of Colson Whitehead, with a particular focus on three novels: Zone One (2011), The Underground Railroad (2016) and The Nickel Boys (2019). I argue that Whitehead’s work is consistently interested in the ability of reading and writing to open up paths towards radical futures beyond the racist structures of capitalist modernity. Whitehead’s writing establishes a dialectical relationship between Afropessimistic claims around the foreclosure of black futures and Afrofuturist investments in articulating and producing black futures via aesthetics. His texts, despite their relentless critique of racist capitalism’s dehumanisation of black people, hinge on moments of utopian reading and writing that gesture towards as yet unknowable futures. The reinscription of historical narratives is key to Whitehead’s project of forging paths towards radical futures via written aesthetics. His work eschews linear historical time in favour of a temporality in which past, present, and future constantly overlap and correspond. This leads to novel strategies, such as his deployment—as I argue—of the trickster-like ‘underground’ narrator Homer in The Underground Railroad. Whitehead’s work is richly intertextual, particularly in its readings and re-inscriptions of important texts in African American literary history, from the antebellum slave narratives through to the novels of Ishmael Reed, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, but also in its intermedial use of music, painting, and film. Through close readings, I explore Whitehead’s intertextual and intermedial signifying; his writing highlights ways in which formal innovation is among the defining attributes of African American literature, and his writing borrows material from the African American literary tradition to create gestures towards radical futures. I argue that Whitehead’s political investment in aesthetic strategies that lead towards utopian black futures is an important and unifying feature of his work.