Slave Narratives and Speculative Fiction in Colson Whitehead’s the Underground Railroad

The paper explores the links between a contemporary novel The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead and the literary genre of slave narratives, and argues that this popular and critically acclaimed novel bases its narrative structure on the adaptation of slave narrative tropes and the use of speculative realism. The theoretical framework first considers some of the basic tenets of slave narratives as a genre and then places Whitehead’s work within a broader context of African American writing, focusing on the relationship between realism and fantasy in slave narratives and Whitehead’s novel. Furthermore, Whitehead’s narrative is also considered in light of Ramón Saldivar’s terms “speculative fiction” or “historical fantasy” (2011, p. 585) which denote a combination of genres blending fantasy and history in order to come up with a contemporary, fluid and multi-faceted narrative way to tell the artistic truth. The central part of the paper offers a reading of Whitehead’s novel based on the argument that it represents a creative contemporary adaptation of the slave narrative literary genre as well as an example of postrace speculative fiction which problematizes and highlights the issue of race and the legacy of slavery in contemporary American society.