Colson Whitehead’s novel Sag Harbor (2009) and Barack Obama’s memoirs Dreams From My Father (1995) both tell a portion of the complicated story of race and race relations in America. The main characters in both of these novels have experiences of...

In Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, Benji is an embodiment of a changing definition of blackness despite his father’s attempt to orient his son to a desirable blackness. Thus I contend that racial socialization for privileged black boys does not...

Colson Whitehead has written an inordinately compelling post-apocalyptic science fiction novel centering around the zombie archetype. In Zone One, he deftly uses the zombie model to create a mediocracy—a populace of dependent thinkers who accept,...

They drag their feet, slouching away from the sun, their palsied, wandering eyes clouded with the blood of rage-busted veins. Desire—the only living thing in them—snarls in the pit of their stomachs, the sole force carrying them forward in their...

In the Underground Railroad, author Colson Whitehead uses the metaphorical instrument of the railroad to the North to portray the deep, systematic roots of the struggles that many still face today. While Cora’s story shows us how far we have come...

In Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, one of her character’s notes that “we believe the one who has the power... So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, ‘Whose story am I missing?’” (Gyasi 239). With this in mind, novels of historical...

The realms of delusion and reality are typically intrinsically separated, existing as opposites in the spectrum between myth and actuality. In The Underground Railroad however, Colson Whitehead merges fantastical and mythical elements with...

The past is anything but mere history; it sheathes, surrounds, and encompasses us, as humans, as we forge on through life. Similarly, in two eminent American works of fiction - The Underground Railroad, The Cafeteria, and Sonny’s Blues - the past...