Writing Your Way out of a Cage : Agency and Dehumanization in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

Abstract: This thesis analyzes the conceptualization of agency as a form of resistance against dehumanizing slavery discourses present in the narrative The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead. For the historical contextualization and the theoretical background, the scholarly work Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi is used. This serves to better illustrate how Whitehead’s novel, despite being fiction, draws on themes and topics that are real to the experience of millions of black people, particularly in the context of American slavery. The analysis demonstrates how the main black characters, particularly Cora, challenge and invert dehumanizing slavery discourses on brutality and sexual violence, mobility, community and bodily autonomy. They do so by reclaiming agency to humanize themselves and their people, reject captivity by escaping, reject isolation by forming and nurturing relationships with one another, and taking ownership over their bodies and minds with every possible means available. Black female characters such as Cora also reject hegemonic masculinity, which is linked to the system of slavery being understood as patriarchal. Such rejection occurs by defying power dynamics which guarantee the subordination of femaleness and blackness, to maleness and whiteness. Another finding of the thesis is the way in which racism, constructed and used to perpetuate racist policies that benefit the interests of white people, leads to a number of black people in the narrative developing a sense of self shaped by racist notions of inferiority, leading them to sabotage themselves and their people. This could be understood as assimilationism, which ranges from a severe self-sabotage, to fighting for acceptance of white people’s approval, buying into the false notion that something was wrong with blackness in the first place. This thesis is unapologetically antiracist and rejects dehumanizing slavery discourse in its writing.