포스트-인종 담론과 인종의 생명정치―콜슨 화이트헤드의 『지하철도』
Post-racial Discourse and the Biopolitics of Race: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad
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This paper examines the ways in which Colson Whitehead’s latest novel The Underground Railroad (2016) critically engages with the post-racial national narrative that claims racism has been overcome and thus race no longer matters in contemporary American society. To do so, the novel not only critiques the biopolitics of race but also reimagines possibilities of freedom and justice that resist the biopolitical capture. Through a fugitive slave Cora’s journey across American states via an actual underground railroad, a speculative reinvention of the secret movement for aiding slaves escape from bondage, the novel foregrounds how racism operates as a biopolitical norm that creates a hierarchical rupture within a population. The slavery of Georgia that disciplines and regulates slaves, the eugenic programs of South Carolina designed to weed out the black population, and the security mechanisms of North Carolina to enhance fear against the black among its white population represent the technologies of racial biopolitics that turn blacks into bare lives. By presenting voices on the colored question and an open ending with Cora heading north, the novel suggests that the precariousness of freedom is a condition in which the Civil Rights Movement’s unfinished projects of freedom, equality, and justice should be further pursued. As a way of contributing to them, the novel revisits and remembers the history of racial biopolitics to counter the historically amnesic triumphalism of the post-racial national narrative.
Abstract
This paper examines the ways in which Colson Whitehead’s latest novel The Underground Railroad (2016) critically engages with the post-racial national narrative that claims racism has been overcome and thus race no longer matters in contemporary American society. To do so, the novel not only critiques the biopolitics of race but also reimagines possibilities of freedom and justice that resist the biopolitical capture. Through a fugitive slave Cora’s journey across American states via an actual underground railroad, a speculative reinvention of the secret movement for aiding slaves escape from bondage, the novel foregrounds how racism operates as a biopolitical norm that creates a hierarchical rupture within a population. The slavery of Georgia that disciplines and regulates slaves, the eugenic programs of South Carolina designed to weed out the black population, and the security mechanisms of North Carolina to enhance fear against the black among its white population represent the technologies of racial biopolitics that turn blacks into bare lives. By presenting voices on the colored question and an open ending with Cora heading north, the novel suggests that the precariousness of freedom is a condition in which the Civil Rights Movement’s unfinished projects of freedom, equality, and justice should be further pursued. As a way of contributing to them, the novel revisits and remembers the history of racial biopolitics to counter the historically amnesic triumphalism of the post-racial national narrative.
참고문헌 (39)
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