African American Fiction between Black Artistic Rendition and White Canonical Interpretation: A Case Study Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

Abstract

African American struggle has been a consistent and ticklish subject in both history and literature for hundreds of years. This study aims to demonstrate how this struggle has been experienced through the accounts of the life of some former slave Abolitionists, which in their turn inspired the Neo-Slave Narratives .The authors of Neo-Slave Narratives like Whitehead centres on the lives of former slaves in antebellum North America, but it is usually fictional. Thus, Whitehead’s work the Underground Railroad has been discussed individually in order to re-read past slavery and to contribute something new to the subject. The work is sufficient to approximate the experiences of the ancestors as well as to point out the reality of a country where black bodies have never, ever, really been truly free.