Mirroring the violence of official archives (Hartman, “Venus” 10), the resulting gaps and distortions in the popular imagination pose a challenge to writers and artists who wish to meaningfully grapple with enslavement. Most recorded testimony from enslaved people has been mediated by the white gaze, either through the expectations of the white abolitionists who published antebellum slave narratives or the primarily white interviewers of the Federal Writers’ Project’s Slave Narrative Collection.¹ Meanwhile, US popular culture has been dominated by sensational white-authored depictions of slavery, from blackface minstrelsy and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1936).

Those units, as Spillers would demonstrate in her analysis of Harriet Beecher Stowe, were heavily influenced by the white-supremacist imagination. Spillers observed that slavery had become “primarily discursive” (29)-known not through any sort of direct knowledge but through the “cultural units” of the stories that have attempted to describe the institution (32). I needed to see how I had been taught to see. Responding to the heightened visibility rather than the absence of slavery from public memory, the novel casts into bold relief the historical frameworks (of American freedom stories and up-from-slavery narratives of racial advancement), pedagogical aims (of racial reconciliation and pluralist inclusion), and aesthetic strategies (of affective identification and cathartic confrontation) at play in current commemorations and exhibitions of slavery. I argue that Whitehead’s literalizing move also deviates from earlier literary efforts to stage a visceral, affective confrontation with the history of slavery. Structured as a train ride that transports readers to different historical sites, the novel at once stages and travesties the Living History practice of materializing the past in all its concrete particularity. Taking as my point of departure Whitehead’s signature move of building narrative worlds based on the logic of literalizing metaphor, I argue that his literal rendering of the Underground Railroad casts the novel as a grotesque tour of the US racial history.

This essay examines Colson Whitehead’s novel in relation to the museumizing of slavery that has gained momentum since the 1990s, focusing in particular on the Living History exhibition practice in which the Underground Railroad has played a vital part.

The underground railroad colson