African American Studies Colson Whitehead
by
Derek C. Maus
  • LAST REVIEWED: 11 May 2023
  • LAST MODIFIED: 22 April 2020
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0081

Introduction

Over the course of a career now in its third decade, Colson Whitehead has produced a nine-book oeuvre that has made him one of the foremost 21st-century American literary authors. Born Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead in New York on November 6, 1969, he spent his childhood and adolescence devouring pop culture—in particular, science fiction and horror films. His early years were generally divided between Manhattan and his family’s summer home in Sag Harbor on Long Island. In 1987, he began studying literature at Harvard University, where he befriended poet and editor Kevin Young and other members of the influential Dark Room Collective. After graduation, he spent several years in New York writing for the Village Voice. During this time, he also started working on what eventually became his debut novel, The Intuitionist (New York: Doubleday, 1999). Although his initial readership remained relatively small, Whitehead’s critical reputation grew quickly, with each of his first two books earning rave reviews and literary prizes. The Intuitionist was a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for debut fiction and his second novel, John Henry Days (New York: Doubleday, 2001), won the Anisfield-Wolf Award, a prize given to exemplary American literary works dealing with racism and diversity. John Henry Days was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2000, he received the Whiting Award, which supports promising new writers, and then followed that up with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (colloquially known as a “Genius Grant”) in 2002 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. Although his third novel, Apex Hides the Hurt (New York: Doubleday, 2006), was less critically lauded, it nevertheless won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, which recognizes outstanding multicultural literature. Over the next decade, Whitehead’s readership began to catch up with his critical acclaim and each of his subsequent five novels has landed on the New York Times bestseller list. The Underground Railroad (New York: Doubleday, 2016) has been his most noteworthy book to date, reaching the top of the New York Times bestseller list, as well as earning him the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the National Book Award, and public endorsements from Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, among others. He followed this success up with a short historical novel, The Nickel Boys (New York: Doubleday, 2019), whose release was accompanied both by considerable fanfare (including Whitehead’s appearance on the cover of Time magazine) and continued critical praise. Although he has gravitated away from the comic-satirical tenor of his earlier work, Whitehead remains both a masterful prose stylist and a pointed social critic.

Primary Sources

As of July 2019, Whitehead’s body of published work consists of seven novels, two books of nonfiction, and roughly two dozen uncollected essays, along with more than fifty Interviews that are available in print or online. Although The Underground Railroad (cited under Novels) has undoubtedly been his greatest success thus far in both critical and commercial terms, he has been heralded as a “writer to watch” (as John Updike called him in a 2001 review in the New Yorker) since making his debut with The Intuitionist (cited under Novels). That first book was compared favorably to such notable precursors as Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon, both of whom Whitehead has cited as formative influences in numerous interviews. As he articulated in an essay entitled “A Psychotronic Childhood” (Whitehead 2012a, cited under Nonfiction), though, the influence of various forms of popular culture was at least as important, particularly to John Henry Days, Sag Harbor, and Zone One (New York: Knopf, cited under Novels). His expansive repertoire of literary and pop-cultural knowledge has contributed to the impressive thematic and stylistic variation among his works, helping him continue his practice of conceiving “each book [as] an antidote to the one [that] came before,” as he told Nikesh Shukla in 2013 (included in Maus 2019, cited under Interviews).

Novels

Whitehead has frequently told interviewers that he strives to avoid repetition in both the formal and thematic aspects of his books. His novels often evoke the conventions of familiar genres and subgenres; however, they also generally veer into less formulaic territory, particularly in their ambiguous endings that confound the frequently clichéd expectations of genre fiction. This technique helps Whitehead establish and then consciously undermine his readers’ preconceptions about his subjects. For example, Whitehead’s 1999 The Intuitionist opens with a tone and a setting reminiscent of the “hard-boiled” detective fiction popularized by such authors as Dashiell Hammett and Walter Mosley. It transcends the usual boundaries of that genre, though, as its description of a political and economic rivalry among urban bureaucrats evolves to encompass the simultaneous searches for the cause of an unlikely elevator accident and for a metaphysical (and possibly nonexistent) book on elevator design. Whitehead’s 2001 John Henry Days intertwines several stories related to the John Henry folk legend with the present-day experiences of a freelance writer struggling to find meaning in the superficially materialistic articles he is paid to produce. Whitehead 2006’s Apex Hides the Hurt examines the creation and commodification of meaning from a different angle by focusing on an ironically unnamed advertising executive whose gift for creating brand names for products has led him to be hired to rename a city undergoing an identity crisis. Having spent most of his childhood summers in Sag Harbor, Whitehead moved into partially autobiographical material with Sag Harbor, which focuses on the idiosyncratic personal and social issues confronting a group of relatively affluent African American teenagers during a summer at the beach in the mid-1980s. Whitehead 2011’s Zone One tapped into his longstanding love for horror films by depicting the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse that has rendered North America largely uninhabitable. The book’s wholly unremarkable protagonist is part of a team attempting to clear the zombie hordes from Lower Manhattan as an initial stage of restoration. The runaway success of Whitehead 2016’s The Underground Railroad coincided with the publication of other “neo-slave narratives” such as Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (New York: Random House, 2016) and Natashia Déon’s Grace (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016). It tells the story of Cora, a slave who escapes her brutal plantation life in Georgia via a literal railroad network beneath the ground and travels to several states that present alternate versions of American society. Finally, Whitehead 2019’s The Nickel Boys depicts the experiences of two boys incarcerated in a brutal reform school in Florida during the Jim Crow era.

  • Whitehead, Colson. The Intuitionist. New York: Doubleday, 1999.

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    This novel tells the story of Lila Mae Watson, the first black woman to work as an elevator inspector in an unnamed city. A mysterious elevator accident threatens not only her professional reputation but that of her “Intuitionist” colleagues, the rivals of the long-dominant “Empiricist” school. She seeks to find not only the cause of the accident but also a mystical text about elevators supposedly written by the Intuitionists’ founder.

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  • Whitehead, Colson. John Henry Days. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

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    This kaleidoscopic novel intertwines two major narratives: a retelling of the folkloric John Henry story that culminates in a duel with a steam-drill, and the present-day experiences of a freelance journalist covering a John Henry festival in rural West Virginia. Interspersed among these two stories are a series of vignettes from various times and places featuring characters whose lives intersect professionally or personally with the John Henry legend.

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  • Whitehead, Colson. Apex Hides the Hurt. New York: Doubleday, 2006.

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    An unnamed “nomenclature consultant” accepts an unusual job to settle a dispute among three parties seeking to change (or to retain) the name of a small midwestern city with a complicated—and partially suppressed—history. The protagonist suffers from both a physical injury and a loss of confidence related to his involvement in the marketing of a shoddy brand of “flesh-colored” bandages that he named “Apex.”

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  • Whitehead, Colson. Sag Harbor. New York: Doubleday, 2009.

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    Benji Cooper and his summertime friends in the Long Island community of Sag Harbor, New York are all “black boys with beach houses” (p. 57), a relatively unusual socioeconomic status that forces them to navigate not only the conventional challenges of adolescence, but also the often unstated and shifting expectations of both their black community of peers and elders and the larger white-dominated society.

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  • Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. New York: Doubleday, 2011.

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    In the aftermath of an unexplained event that has turned large portions of the American populace into one of two kinds of zombies, aggressive “skels” and comparatively passive “stragglers,” Mark Spitz is a wholly unremarkable survivor who joins in the “American Phoenix” project that intends to reclaim Lower Manhattan from the zombie hordes and restore the consumerist society that has been disrupted by America’s apocalyptic transformation.

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  • Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. New York: Doubleday, 2016.

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    After escaping from the brutal Georgia plantation on which she, her mother, and her grandmother all toiled as slaves, Cora travels to a series of states—South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana—each of which presents an alternate version of how 19th-century America might have responded to slavery. Cora frequently travels by means of a network of clandestine trains that run through subterranean tunnels, a literalized underground railroad.

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  • Whitehead, Colson. The Nickel Boys. New York: Doubleday, 2019.

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    Elwood and Turner, two black teenagers living in segregated Tallahassee, Florida, are sent to a reform school called the Nickel Academy (based on the real-life Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida). They not only experience brutal and arbitrary punishment, but also come to recognize that the idealism of the burgeoning civil rights movement may not be sufficient to overcome Jim Crow.

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Nonfiction

Although his literary reputation is primarily based on his fiction, Whitehead actually began his career as a professional writer producing freelance journalism and reviews (mostly of television and music) for the Village Voice during the early to mid-1990s. Even after making a name for himself as a novelist, he has continued to be a frequent contributor of essays about such topics as race (Whitehead 2008 and Whitehead 2009b), the craft of writing (Whitehead 2009a and Whitehead 2009c), popular culture (Whitehead 2012b), and the influence of technology and the media (Whitehead 2015) to a number of prominent newspapers and magazines. The New York Times, in particular has published a number of his essays, especially in the years immediately after Barack Obama’s first election as President of the United States. Both of his published books of nonfiction began as shorter pieces. Whitehead 2003’s The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts originated with a New York Times essay that Whitehead published two months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It consists of thirteen impressionistic essays about New York, where Whitehead has lived most of his life. Likewise, Whitehead 2014’s The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death is an expanded version of a series of articles that he wrote for the Grantland website after being staked to participate in the World Series of Poker in 2011. He also offered a firsthand perspective on the London Summer Olympics for the same website in Whitehead 2012a. Despite sometimes portraying himself in his essays as a meek introvert, Whitehead has also engaged in several fairly public literary feuds, the most notorious of which involved Whitehead 2002, a negative review that enraged author Richard Ford to the point of his allegedly spitting in Whitehead’s face at a party years later.

  • Whitehead, Colson. “The End of the Affair.” New York Times Book Review 151, 3 March 2002: 8.

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    Whitehead’s negative review of Richard Ford’s collection of stories, A Multitude of Sins (London: Vintage, 2002) enraged Ford to the point that he later confronted Whitehead at a party and allegedly spit in his face.

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  • Whitehead, Colson. The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

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    The core of this collection of impressionistic sketches about Whitehead’s native city is an essay entitled “The Way We Live Now; 11–11–01; Lost and Found” that Whitehead published in the New York Times two months after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The individual essays focus mostly on notable places like Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, but some cover abstractions such as rush hour and rain.

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  • Whitehead, Colson. “Finally, a Thin President.” New York Times, 6 November 2008: 33.

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    Published the day after Barack Obama’s election as the first black President of the United States, this essay satirically comments on the significance of Obama’s race by not only addressing some of the fears of a black chief executive that white Americans expressed during the campaign, but also by giving equal relevance to his thin stature.

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  • Whitehead, Colson. “Picking a Genre.” New York Times Book Review, 1 November 2009a: 23.

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    Published after Sag Harbor (cited under Novels), this essay pokes light fun at some readers’ frustration with Whitehead’s practice of varying his form and subject widely from one book to the next by suggesting that he selects his topics and styles at random using a dartboard covered in literary formulas.

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  • Whitehead, Colson. “The Year of Living Postracially.” New York Times, 3 November 2009b: 31.

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    In much the same tenor as Whitehead 2008, this essay mockingly accepts the premise that Barack Obama’s election ushered in a “postracial” society in the United States. With racism presumably solved as a social ill, Whitehead nominates himself as secretary of postracial affairs with the aim of turning the nation’s attention to the crisis of restless leg syndrome.

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  • Whitehead, Colson. “Wow, Fiction Works!.” Harper’s Magazine 318, February 2009c: 29–31.

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    Ostensibly an excerpt from “James Root on How to Read,” this essay parodies literary critic James Wood’s book How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), which championed a version of conventional literary realism quite alien to Whitehead’s fiction. Wood had previously panned John Henry Days (cited under Novels), which he called “extraordinarily uneven, and sometimes even barely comprehensible.”

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  • Whitehead, Colson. “Hard Times in the Uncanny Valley.” In Grantland.com., August 24, 2012a.

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    In this series of four articles (combined into one essay on the linked page) for the ESPN-affiliated Grantland website, Whitehead offers his first-hand impressions—along with wry commentary from a Siri-like cell-phone app bearing the personality of deceased German novelist W. G. Sebald—of both the sports and spectacles of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

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  • Whitehead, Colson. “A Psychotronic Childhood.” New Yorker 88.16, 4 June 2012b: 98–105.

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    Perhaps the most detailed personal essay Whitehead has published to date, this piece describes the effects of Whitehead’s rabid consumption of horror and science fiction films during his self-described childhood as “something of a shut-in” on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s.

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  • Whitehead, Colson. The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death. New York: Doubleday, 2014.

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    Arising from a series of essays entitled “Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia” that Whitehead, a famously avid amateur poker player, wrote for the ESPN-affiliated Grantland website, this book self-deprecatingly recounts his experiences of preparing for and participating in the World Series of Poker in 2011. The original Grantland essays are available online.

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  • Whitehead, Colson. “Life without Pity.” New York Times Magazine 164, 8 March 2015: 17–19.

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    This essay takes the reality-television concept of the “loser edit” (a narrative that justifies the elimination of a contestant by the end of an episode) and applies it not only to such public figures as Brian Williams and Bill Cosby, but also to the contemporary lives of ordinary individuals.

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Interviews

Whitehead has participated in dozens of published interviews since making his debut. The first of these is Miller 1999, in which he discusses The Intuitionist (cited under Novels) not long after its release. Maus 2019 collects twenty-three interviews published in print and online between 2001 and 2016, inclusively covering the period between the publications of John Henry Days and The Underground Railroad (both cited under Novels). Sherman 2001, Madrigal 2011, Sky 2011, Freeman 2016, and Jones 2016 are five additional online interviews omitted from Maus 2019 that provide insights into Whitehead’s writing process, his influences, and his choices of themes and subjects. Davies 2019 and Sandhu 2019 both focus primarily on Whitehead’s most recent novel, The Nickel Boys (cited under Novels).

Secondary Sources

The critical attention paid to Whitehead’s work has been steadily accelerating since 2004, when the first flurry of essays about his work appeared (Butler 2004, cited under Comparative Analyses; Inscoe 2004, cited under History and Historiography; Bérubé 2004, cited under Race and Identity). Although the first decade of Whitehead scholarship skewed heavily toward examinations of The Intuitionist and John Henry Days (both cited under Novels), more recent work has expanded the critical coverage of his work to the point that each of his books except The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death (cited under Nonfiction) has been the primary subject of at least one journal article or book chapter. As of 2019, there are two published monographs (Fain 2015 and Maus 2014, both cited under General Overviews) about Whitehead, each of which predates the sensation that arose with the publication of The Underground Railroad (cited under Novels). The recurrent themes within the scholarship on Whitehead include the following: his depictions of and commentaries on Race and Identity; the ways in which American history is constructed and how and why that process should be revisited; the influence of technology on American culture; Whitehead’s complex relationship to various literary genres and forms; the place (or lack thereof) of the self within various social structures; and comparisons with a wide range of literary ancestors and contemporaries.

General Overviews

The relative scarcity of career-spanning scholarship regarding Whitehead until the mid-2010s can perhaps be explained by his slow-but-steady transformation from somewhat obscure critical darling to one of the more recognizable names in contemporary American literature. His intentional lack of overlap from book to book also complicates any effort to synthesize an overarching critical perspective. As the first extended study of Whitehead’s output from The Intuitionist through Zone One (both cited under Novels), Maus 2014 represents what reviewer Howard Rambsy II called a “cornerstone in what might someday become known as Whitehead studies.” It was followed in short order by Fain 2015, which focused heavily on Whitehead’s first three books in relation to “postracial” discourse, a contentious notion that Whitehead himself lampooned in a New York Times essay entitled “The Year of Living Postracially” (Whitehead 2009b, cited under Nonfiction). Lorentzen 2016 is an online essay published not long after the release of The Underground Railroad (cited under Novels) and charts the ways in which that novel connects back to particular themes and techniques found in Whitehead’s earlier books. In the course of making a critical argument about Whitehead’s critique of neoliberalism in The Intuitionist, Zone One, and The Underground Railroad, Grausam 2017 outlines the development of several major themes in Whitehead’s work over the course of nearly two decades and five novels.

  • Fain, Kimberly. Colson Whitehead: The Postracial Voice of Contemporary Literature. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.

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    Published just after The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death (cited under Nonfiction), this extended study of Whitehead’s career up to that point—with a heavy emphasis on his first three books—attempts to situate him within a “new millennial African American tradition of addressing race” (p. xiii). Fain argues that Whitehead comments critically on the discourse regarding the prospects of a “postracial” America without wholly validating or rejecting it.

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  • Grausam, Daniel. “The Multitemporal Contemporary: Colson Whitehead’s Presents.” In Literature and the Global Contemporary. Edited by Sarah Brouillette, Mathias Nilges, and Emilio Sauri, 117–133. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

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    This essay argues that Whitehead’s three “speculative” novels—The Intuitionist, Zone One and The Underground Railroad—each feature a complex and intentionally anachronistic sense of their respective temporal settings that helps to convey Whitehead’s criticisms of neoliberal America.

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  • Lorentzen, Christian. “How Pyrotechnic Comic Novelist Colson Whitehead Found His Way to the Grim, Measured Underground Railroad.” Vulture.com (13 September 2016).

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    Published online at roughly the same time as The Underground Railroad, this essay traces the development of Whitehead’s career with an eye toward showing how his new novel incorporates and refines various aspects of his prior work, even as it also departs significantly from the prevailing comic-satirical tenor of those books.

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  • Maus, Derek C. Understanding Colson Whitehead. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014.

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    The first published monograph about Whitehead and his work, this book begins with a brief overview of Whitehead’s life and career up to 2013, followed by an explication of a pair of contemporary literary-critical discourses: historiographic metafiction and the generational post-soul aesthetic. Each of Whitehead’s first six books receives an extended critical examination within these contexts.

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Comparative Analyses

Critics have compared Whitehead’s writing to that of other notable authors since the earliest reviews of The Intuitionist (cited under Novels): some of their essays draw parallels between his work and that of Stephen King, Thomas Pynchon, Ralph Ellison, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison, just to name a few. As scholars have taken up the task of analyzing Whitehead’s work, comparison with literary predecessors and peers has become one of the most common approaches. Such methods have often been part of an effort to categorize Whitehead; for example, Butler 2004 links Whitehead and Jeffrey Reynard Allen as urban postmodernists, a motive that recurs in Morrison 2017, which pairs Whitehead and Robert Coover in an “infrastructuralist” interpretive mode. Berlant 2008, Lavender 2007, and Spencer 2016 all place Whitehead in conversation with writers associated with various discourses associated with speculative fiction. Huehls 2016 emphasizes the idiosyncratic insignificance of race in works by Whitehead and Percival Everett, while Elam 2007 and Grausam 2011 juxtapose Whitehead with a pair of later Philip Roth novels in which race features prominently. Ramsey 2007 and Tucker 2010 both look backward to discuss John Henry Days and The Intuitionist (both cited under Novels), respectively, in terms of specific literary and “paraliterary” forerunners.

  • Berlant, Lauren. “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event.” American Literary History 20.4 (Winter 2008): 845–860.

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    Compares The Intuitionist to William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (New York: G. P. Putnam, 2003) in terms of the depiction of the physical and emotional affects expressed by the two books’ protagonists when faced with traumatic circumstances. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Butler, Robert. “The Postmodern City in Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York and Jeffrey Renard Allen’s Rails under My Back.” CLA Journal 48.1 (September 2004): 71–87.

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    This essay compares the Chicago of Allen’s novel with the New York depicted in Whitehead’s collection of nonfiction sketches. Butler argues that both postmodernist literary cities are notable for appearing powerful on the surface but actually being vulnerable both to external threats and internal contradictions. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Elam, Michele. “Passing in the Post-Race Era: Danzy Senna, Philip Roth, and Colson Whitehead.” African American Review 41.4 (Winter 2007): 749–768.

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    This article discusses The Intuitionist alongside Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (New York: Riverhead, 1998) and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (New York: Vintage, 2001) as exemplars of a new mixed-race fiction that transcends the extant conventions of the “passing” novel. This piece is later expanded in her The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011). Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Grausam, Daniel. “After the Post(al).” American Literary History 23.3 (Fall 2011): 625–642.

    DOI: 10.1093/alh/ajr018Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay discusses the use of postage stamps in both John Henry Days and Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004). Grausam sees stamps as a metaphor for a type of historical consciousness threatened by the diminishment of print culture in what he calls a “post-postal” society. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Huehls, Mitchum. After Critique: Twenty-First Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

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    Chapter 3 of this book compares The Intuitionist with three works by Percival Everett: Glyph (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 1999); Erasure (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2001); and I Am Not Sidney Poitier (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2009). Huehls contends that all of these works are distinct because they “acknowledge the existence of race, but they reject the idea that race necessarily bears any representational or referential value.”

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  • Lavender, Isiah III. “Ethnoscapes: Environment and Language in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, and Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17.” Science Fiction Studies 34.2 (2007): 187–200.

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    This article looks at Whitehead’s debut novel along with novels by two esteemed African American precursors. Lavender coins the term “ethnoscape” to explicate the way each of them constructs a systemically racialized environment in their fictions. This piece is later expanded in his Race in American Science Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Morrison, Spencer. “Elevator Fiction: Robert Coover, Colson Whitehead, and the Sense of Infrastructure.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 73.3 (Autumn 2017): 101–125.

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    This essay examines Coover’s short story “The Elevator” (1967) as an overlooked precursor to The Intuitionist. Morrison suggests that both works offer an “infrastructuralist” literary perspective that conveys possibilities for emancipatory political action. Available online by subscription.

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  • Ramsey, William. “An End of Southern History: The Down-Home Quests of Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead.” African American Review 41.4 (2007): 769–785.

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    This essay compares John Henry Days with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (New York: Penguin, 1977); Beloved (New York: Penguin, 1987); and Paradise (New York: Vintage, 1998), arguing that all four novels indicate a shift in contemporary African American fiction that conceives of the American South less as a cohesive geographic region and more as a sociological construct. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Spencer, Rochelle. “Afro-Surreal and Afro-Futuristic Visual Technologies in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.” Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought 5.1 (2016): 209–224.

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    This essay looks at two exemplary works of contemporary fiction and frames them within two related, yet distinct, modes of speculative artistic expression. Spencer identifies Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead, 2007) as a contemporary Afro-Surrealist work, while calling Zone One (cited under Novels) an exemplar of Afro-Futurism.

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  • Tucker, Jeffrey Allen. “‘Verticality Is Such a Risky Enterprise’: The Literary and Paraliterary Antecedents of Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 43.1 (2010): 148–156.

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    This essay examines a range of “paraliterary” influences—best described as the “lowbrow” forms of artistic expression against which high culture defines its refinement—that the author sees at work in Whitehead’s debut novel. Tucker focuses particularly on the paraliterary aspects that Whitehead imports from “hard-boiled” detective fiction and comic books. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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Genre and Narrative

In a 2013 interview with Nikesh Shukla (collected in Maus 2019, cited under Interviews), Whitehead described his authorial approach to Sag Harbor (cited under Novels) as being akin to wearing drag: “I was wearing realist drag in the same way that I have worn detective drag or horror drag in my other books. And I think by avoiding certain expectations of plot and a certain kind of narrative satisfaction I’m doing my own kind of version of it” (p. 102). Given his self-conscious permutation of literary forms, it comes as no surprise that a significant subset of the scholarship on Whitehead looks at how he both participates in and departs from conventions of structure and narrative in his fiction. Perhaps the most prevalent of these approaches looks at Whitehead’s use of the tropes of “zombie apocalypse” film and fiction in Zone One (cited under Novels), with Swanson 2014, Caughey 2015, and Lenz 2017 all covering some aspect thereof. Ardoin 2019 also examines Zone One, but focuses not on its genre but on its narrative strategy of intentionally denying the reader details that would specify its protagonist’s race. The Intuitionist (cited under Novels) is the focus of Hock 2016, Knight 2015, and Liggins 2006. These essays respectively analyze the novel’s postmodernist deformation of detective fiction, its secularization of a longstanding prophetic tradition in African American culture, and its complex relationship to various strands of gothic fiction. De Caro 2013 examines Whitehead’s repurposing of folkloric tales in John Henry Days (cited under Novels) and Katz 2010 uses the framework of historical fiction to analyze Whitehead’s nonfictional The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts (cited under Nonfiction). Feith 2018 is the first entry into what promises to be a rich vein of criticism that looks at how The Underground Railroad (cited under Novels) redeploys conventions from the 19th-century slave narrative to comment on 21st- century America.

  • Ardoin, Paul. “‘Have You to This Point Assumed That I Am White?’: Narrative Withholding since Playing in the Dark.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 44.1 (Spring 2019): 160–180.

    DOI: 10.1093/melus/mly058Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Compares the technique of intentionally withholding information about a narrator’s race in Zone One and Percival Everett’s Glyph (Minnesota: Graywolf, 1999), using Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992) as an overarching critical lens. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Caughey, John S. “A Zombie Novel with Brains’: Bringing Genre to Life in the Classroom.” Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice 7.3-4 (Fall-Winter 2015): 1–22.

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    Focused on teaching the novel in college classrooms, this essay argues that using the genre conventions of Zone One as the starting point for a classroom discussion opens up other aspects of interpretation and self-awareness for students.

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  • De Caro, Frank. Folklore Recycled: Old Traditions in New Contexts. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.

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    Expanded from an article originally published in The Folklore Historian in 2006, the first chapter of this book not only examines Whitehead’s use of folkloric elements in John Henry Days but also engages in a metatextual examination of “the role of folklore in American society and the way folklore is viewed, exploited, recycled, transmitted, transformed, and made symbolic” (p. 31).

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  • Feith, Michel. “Tracking the Slave Narrative in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016).” Revue française d’études américaines 157 (2018): 146–160.

    DOI: 10.3917/rfea.157.0146Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay argues that The Underground Railroad is a “post-black” novel in dialogue with both the conventional slave narrative of the 19th-century and “neo-slave narratives” that revitalized the form in the later 20th century. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Hock, Stephen. “The Black Box of Genre in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist and Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.” In The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel. Edited by Tim Lanzendörfer, 57–71. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016.

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    This essay compares the metafictional use of imagery related to boxes in Whitehead’s debut novel with Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (New York: Pantheon, 2010). Hock contends that both books use boxes metaphorically to comment on the ways in which they transcend the constraints of the genres (detective fiction and science fiction, respectively) in which they initially appear to be participating.

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  • Katz, Tamar. “City Memory, City History: Urban Nostalgia, The Colossus of New York, and Late-Twentieth-Century Historical Fiction.” Contemporary Literature 51.4 (Winter 2010): 810–851.

    DOI: 10.1353/cli.2011.0000Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This lengthy essay places Whitehead’s 2003 collection of essays about New York into the context of historical fiction written around the turn of the millennium. Katz examines how the language of loss and memory pervades not only Whitehead’s book but also Caleb Carr’s The Alienist (New York: Little, Brown, 1994) and Kevin Baker’s Dreamland (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), two books that she considers exemplars of contemporary historical fiction. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Knight, Nadine M. “‘It’s a New Day’: The Intuitionist, The Wire, and Prophetic Tradition.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 40.4 (Winter 2015): 28–47.

    DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlv038Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay links Whitehead’s debut novel with the Home Box Office television series The Wire (2002–2008) in terms of their secularized repurposing of tropes arising from an African American prophetic tradition that dates back to such 19th-century figures as Nat Turner and David Walker. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Lenz, Wylie. “Toward a Genealogy of the American Zombie Novel: From Jack London to Colson Whitehead.” In The Written Dead: Essays on the Literary Zombie. Edited by Kyle William Bishop, William Angela Tenga, and Robert G. Weiner, 98–119. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017.

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    This essay attempts to counterbalance the excessive attention that Lenz feels has been paid to cinematic versions of the zombie story. He instead analyzes Zone One within the literary lineage of the “apocalyptic plague narrative” in English, which arises from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (London: Dodd and Graves, 1722).

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  • Liggins, Saundra. “The Urban Gothic Vision of Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.” African American Review 40.2 (Summer 2006): 359–369.

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    This essay situates The Intuitionist not only in the tradition of the gothic novel in its European and American forms, but also in the altered and repurposed African American gothic tradition that includes Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Ralph Ellison. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Swanson, Carl Joseph. “‘The Only Metaphor Left’: Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Zombie Narrative Form.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 47.3 (Fall 2014): 379–405.

    DOI: 10.1215/00166928-2797225Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay argues that Zone One is actually a more conventional zombie novel than most previous critics and reviewers have perceived. Swanson uses the nature of Whitehead’s zombies, the barricades erected against them, and the nature of the zombies’ breaching of those barricades to support his case. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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History and Historiography

Although it manifests in a variety of contexts, one of the common themes in Whitehead’s work concerns the question of who is in control of the construction of history and how that control affects various groups and individuals. Russell 2007 examines The Intuitionist (cited under Novels), which begins this process partly through its physical and temporal setting, which is reminiscent of 1950s New York with some significant intentional anachronisms. Collins 2013, Inscoe 2004, Lieber 2014, and Walonen 2014 all focus on John Henry Days (cited under Novels), which repeatedly blurs the line between history and myth and, like The Intuitionist, features an ambiguous ending that muddies the notion that understanding history leads to absolute truth. Marshall 2015 surveys the manner in which Zone One (cited under Novels) casts a glance at an end to history resulting from human agency. Dischinger 2017 and Dubek 2018 both analyze how Whitehead intentionally frustrates a strictly historical interpretation of his depiction of slavery in America in The Underground Railroad (cited under Novels) in order to emphasize connections to the present. Leise 2014 and Lukin 2008 both examine Apex Hides the Hurt (cited under Novels), a novel whose emphasis on the power to name things and places serves as an extended historiographic metaphor.

  • Collins, Peter. “The Ghosts of Economics Past: John Henry Days and the Production of History.” African American Review 46.2–3 (Summer/Fall 2013): 285–300.

    DOI: 10.1353/afa.2013.0043Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay looks at the historical and economic critique conveyed through the use of ghosts— particularly those of John Henry and the mostly black railroad workers who worked on the railroad tunnels near Talcott, West Virginia—in John Henry Days. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Dischinger, Matthew. “States of Possibility in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.” The Global South 11.1 (2017): 82–99.

    DOI: 10.2979/globalsouth.11.1.05Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Dischinger posits that The Underground Railroad is best understood as a work of “speculative satire” that uses elements of fantasy and “rearranged” factual details to alter its readers’ understanding of the nature of the historical realities it depicts. In doing so, it attempts makes them more cognizant of the need to repair the personal and societal damage done by slavery. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Dubek, Laura. “‘Fight for It!’: The Twenty-First-Century Underground Railroad.” In Special Issue: Slavery and the Contemporary Imagination. Edited by Janell Hobson and Jane Caputi Journal of American Culture 41.1 (March 2018): 68–80.

    DOI: 10.1111/jacc.12841Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay analyzes The Underground Railroad alongside the WGN television series Underground (2016–2017) “not only as revisionist slave narratives but also as allegorical narratives about the making of a (white) nation” (p. 70) that speak directly to the cultural situation in the United States in the early 21st century. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Inscoe, John C. “Race and Remembrance in West Virginia: John Henry for a Post-Modern Age.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 10.1–2 (Spring/Fall 2004): 85–94.

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    Despite a number of glaring typographical errors—such as repeatedly referring to the author as “Colin Whitehead”—this essay looks at how John Henry Days depicts and comments on the interaction between nonwhite outsiders like John Henry, J. Sutter, and Pamela Street and the predominantly white culture of Appalachia. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Leise, Christopher. “With Names, No Coincidence: Colson Whitehead’s Postracial Puritan Allegory.” African American Review 47.2–3 (Summer/Fall 2014): 285–300.

    DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2018.0021Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay traces the echoes of Puritan thought and literature, particularly allusions to the writings of John Winthrop, that pervade Apex Hides the Hurt. This piece is later expanded in his The Story upon a Hill: The Puritan Myth in Contemporary American Fiction (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017). Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Lieber, Marlon. “‘It’s Always Mississippi in the Fifties’: Colson Whitehead’s Imaginative Geography of the U.S. South.” In The South from Elsewhere. Edited by Marcel Arbeit, 115–128. Olomouc, Czech Republic: Palacký University, 2014.

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    This essay looks at the South as it is depicted in John Henry Days as a combination of real and imagined geographical understandings. This mixture speaks as much to problems with J. Sutter’s perspective as to the culture of West Virginia that he encounters in the book.

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  • Lukin, Josh. “The Resistant Body: Disability, History, and Classical Heroism in Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt.” In Engaging Tradition, Making It New: Essays on Teaching Recent African American Literature. Edited by Stephanie Brown and Éva Tettenborn, 123–142. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2008.

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    This essay argues that Apex Hides the Hurt is a retelling of the ancient Greek play Philoctetes (409 BCE) by Sophocles. Although he is well-versed in and fond of allusions to classical literature, Whitehead’s narrator is not simply an update of this classical hero, though, and Lukin urges teachers of the novel to explicate the differences between the cultural values attributed to a hero in both works.

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  • Marshall, Kate. “What Are the Novels of the Anthropocene?: American Fiction in Geological Time.” American Literary History 27.3 (Fall 2015): 523–538.

    DOI: 10.1093/alh/ajv032Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay discusses Zone One along with Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (New York: Scribner, 2013); Ken Kalfus’s Equilateral (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); and Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (New York: Scribner, 2010) as works of American fiction that express an understanding of the geological realities of the 21st century in terms of human influence on the global environment. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Russell, Allison. “Recalibrating the Past: Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.” Critique 49.1 (Fall 2007): 46–60.

    DOI: 10.3200/CRIT.49.1.46-60Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay looks at The Intuitionist as the offspring of such postmodernist ancestors as Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Bantam, 1966) and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Avon, 1972). However, it also argues that as a work of “antidetective fiction,” Whitehead’s novel also playfully leads readers to validate reading as a communal and communicative act, even if that act cannot impart absolute truths. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Walonen, Michael K. “‘This Making of Truth is Violence Too, Out of Which Facts Are Formed’: Colson Whitehead’s Secret History of Post-Reconstruction America in John Henry Days.” Literature and History 23.2 (Autumn 2014): 67–80.

    DOI: 10.7227/LH.23.2.5Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay suggests that John Henry Days represents a parallel history of the United States after Reconstruction. Walonen analyzes the novel’s depiction of resistance—in the manner of John Henry—to the steady acceleration in the dehumanizing power of technology throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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Race and Identity

In an interview published not long after The Intuitionist (cited under Novels), Whitehead stated that “I’m dealing with serious race issues, but I’m not handling them in a way that people expect” (Miller 1999, cited under Interviews). This statement continues to hold true throughout the rest of Whitehead’s fiction. John Henry Days (cited under Novels) depicts the ongoing cultural legacy of perhaps the most famous figure in African American folklore. Apex Hides the Hurt (cited under Novels) uses the metaphor of a brand of “flesh-colored” bandages to explore the shifting valuation of race in America. Sag Harbor (cited under Novels) suggests the complex, perhaps impossible set of racialized expectations that a relatively affluent black teenager like Whitehead himself faced in the mid-1980s. The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys (both cited under Novels) depict the hardships imposed on African Americans during the repressive eras of slavery and Jim Crow, respectively. Bérubé 2004 was among the first scholarly essays on Whitehead’s work and looks at how race and disability intertwine in The Intuitionist. Selzer 2009 and Saldívar 2013 likewise focus on racial aspects of Whitehead’s debut. Several of the more recent scholarly pieces (e.g., Brown 2018, Cohn 2009, Heneks 2018, Leader-Picone 2015) on Whitehead utilize one of more of the discourses of post-blackness, post-race, and the post-soul aesthetic that are often (and mistakenly) perceived as synonymous with one another. Li 2011 analyzes Apex Hides the Hurt as a work that prefigures the racial identity politics that Barack Obama faced as president. New 2008 looks at the relationship between music and racialized myth in John Henry Days, while Schur 2013 uses Sag Harbor as a jumping-off point for a broader discussion of the debate over the existence and desirability of racial authenticity in contemporary African American literature.

  • Bérubé, Michael. “Race and Modernity in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.” In The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction. Edited by Peter Freese and Charles B. Harris, 163–178. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2004.

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    Among the earliest scholarly essays to address Whitehead’s work, this piece draws parallels between Whitehead’s novel and postmodernist works by Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and E. L. Doctorow, among others. It also analyzes the ways in which the novel intertwines discussions of race and disability, suggesting that elevators serve as a metaphor of equal access.

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  • Brown, Christopher M. “Passing for Postracial: Colorblind Reading Practices of Zombies, Sheriffs, and Slaveholders.” In Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow. Edited by Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Young, 68–83. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018.

    DOI: 10.5406/j.ctt21c4tm7.9Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay uses the near-complete absence of racialized descriptors in Zone One to compare that novel with Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (New York: Olive, 2004). Brown sees both books as a new kind of “passing” novel that undermine the ostensibly “colorblind” and “postracial” perspectives frequently invoked in contemporary American cultural discourse.

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  • Cohn, Jesse S. “Old Afflictions: Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt and the ‘Post-Soul Condition.’” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 42.1 (Spring 2009): 15–24.

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    This essay rests on the premise that “Whitehead’s writings betray a sense of anxiety over the source of cultural value, of guilty indebtedness to the past” (p. 21) in considering how and why Apex Hides the Hurt relates to the relatively open-ended definition of contemporary black identity summed up as the “post-soul condition.” Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Heneks, Grace. “The American Subplot: Colson Whitehead’s Post-Racial Allegory in Zone One.” The Comparatist 42 (October 2018): 60–79.

    DOI: 10.1353/com.2018.0003Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This article draws a parallel between the postapocalyptic world of Zone One and the claims of a “postracial” American society. The imminent failure of the American Phoenix’s efforts to expel the zombies from Lower Manhattan suggests that its philosophy is, like postracialism, insufficient for addressing the existential threat at hand. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Leader-Picone, Cameron. “Post-Black Stories: Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor and Racial Individualism.” Contemporary Literature 56.3 (Fall 2015): 421–449.

    DOI: 10.3368/cl.56.3.421Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay uses the depiction of Benji Cooper, the protagonist of Sag Harbor, to examine Whitehead’s relationship to various contemporary conceptions of black artistic identity (e.g., “post-blackness” and “the post-soul aesthetic”) that emphasize individual creativity rather than communal obligation to the race. This piece is later expanded in his Black and More than Black: African American Fiction in the Post Era (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019). Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Li, Stephanie. Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011.

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    Chapter 2 analyzes Apex Hides the Hurt as a literary work prefiguring issues of racial categorization and self-determination that Barack Obama faced. Li relates Whitehead’s novel to Ellison’s Invisible Man (New York: Modern Library, 1952), claiming that Whitehead’s protagonist becomes invisible because he willingly denies his racial identity in order to mollify his white colleagues by not challenging their claims of color-blindness.

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  • New, Michael. “‘Nothing But a Man’: Racial Identity and Musical Production in John Henry Days.” In New Essays on the African American Novel: From Hurston and Ellison to Morrison and Whitehead. Edited by Lovalerie King and Linda F. Selzer, 241–258. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

    DOI: 10.1007/978-0-230-61275-4_16Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay focuses on Whitehead’s use of music as a medium in which the John Henry legend is transmitted and repurposed by a variety of characters in different times and using different technologies. According to New, Whitehead questions whether commercialized musical versions of the legend that are increasingly separated from the story’s origins can still express any of its sense of empowered black identity.

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  • Saldívar, Ramón. “The Second Elevation of the Novel: Race, Form, and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary Narrative.” Narrative 21.1 (January 2013): 1–18.

    DOI: 10.1353/nar.2013.0000Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay provocatively discusses The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, and Zone One within the context of a “postrace aesthetic,” which Saldívar defines at length and quite differently from those who have used similar terminology to proclaim that race-consciousness and racism have ended. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Schur, Richard. “The Crisis of Authenticity in Contemporary African American Literature.” In Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon. Edited by Lovalerie King and Shirley Moody-Turner, 235–254. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

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    This essay singles out Sag Harbor and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (New York: Riverhead, 1998) as fictional texts by contemporary black and mixed-race writers that reject the notion that there is an “authentic” black identity of the sort frequently championed during earlier periods of African American cultural history.

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  • Selzer, Linda. “Instruments More Perfect than Bodies: Romancing Uplift in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.” African American Review 43.4 (Winter 2009): 681–698.

    DOI: 10.1353/afa.2009.0059Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay complicates readings of Whitehead’s debut novel that equate his depictions of elevators with an endorsement of “uplift ideology.” Selzer contends that the book’s ambiguous ending leaves considerable doubt as to whether Lila Mae’s quest for Fulton’s mystical “black box” elevator design is a noble ambition or a fantasy that distracts her from more potentially meaningful endeavors. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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Self and Society

Much of Whitehead’s work is concerned with the particular difficulties of individuals finding a place in society. Lila Mae Watson and Cora, the protagonists of The Intuitionist (cited under Novels) and The Underground Railroad (cited under Novels), respectively, are both limited in their freedoms by the overwhelmingly sexist and racist societies in which they live. J Sutter of John Henry Days (cited under Novels) and the unnamed protagonist of Apex Hides the Hurt (cited under Novels) both are in the midst of existential crises regarding their work as the novels in which they appear open. Benji Cooper of Sag Harbor (cited under Novels) is trapped by the unreasonable expectations imposed on him by both white and black members of the societies in which he lives, and the encroaching zombies of Zone One (cited under Novels) threaten not only the existence of the book’s antihero, Mark Spitz, but also of humanity as a whole. Even Whitehead’s nonfiction conveys this theme, with The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts (cited under Nonfiction) being something of a bittersweet tribute to a city scarred by 9/11 and The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death (also cited under Nonfiction) sardonically depicting Whitehead’s participation in the World Series of Poker as an ostensible representative of the “Republic of Anhedonia.” The interplay between the self and society in Whitehead gets examined through a wide range of disciplinary lenses. Within the realm of mind-brain science, Benedi 2019 looks at Whitehead’s debut using neurology, and both Li 2008 and Shermeyer 2017 employ concepts from trauma psychology to examine The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts (and Zone One) respectively. Levine 2011 and Tettenborn 2013 each focus on the gender aspects of Whitehead’s work, while Libretti 2014 emphasizes class relationships. Hess 2014 compares Benji’s self-conception in Sag Harbor to a musical pastiche, whereas Rambsy 2008 looks at Whitehead’s reception within both academia and the publishing industry. Finally, Gauthier 2016 and Hurley 2015 find insights into Whitehead’s work by using the discourses of urban planning and biopolitics, respectively.

  • Benedi, Pilar Martinez. “Where Racial Meets Neuro Diversity: Pondering ‘Who’s We’ in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 60.2 (2019): 179–190.

    DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2018.1531819Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay builds on the later stages of Bérubé 2004, cited under Race and Identity in seeing the interconnection of narratives of race and disability in Whitehead’s debut novel. Benedi looks specifically at how Whitehead employs a neurodiverse perspective in paralleling Lila Mae’s racial difference with the unusual cognitive style that makes her the titular Intuitionist. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Gauthier, Tim S. “Zombies, the Uncanny, and the City: Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.” In The City Since 9/11: Literature, Film, Television. Edited by Keith Wilhite, 109–125. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016.

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    This essay argues that not only are many of the inhabitants of Manhattan in Zone One zombies, but that the city itself is a kind of zombie that metaphorically suggests fears about the fundamental unsustainability of contemporary urban spaces and the organizational and administrative principles that underlie them.

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  • Hess, John Joseph. “Music Consumption and the Remix of Self in Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor.” In Write in Tune: Contemporary Music in Fiction. Edited by Erich Hertz and Jeffrey Roessner, 169–181. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

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    Looking closely at the musical references in Sag Harbor, this essay concludes that Whitehead uses the dual turntables featured prominently in hip-hop performances like the one by UTFO that takes place in the novel as metaphors to suggest that Benji Cooper’s self-conception is being “remixed” like the pieces of music used in these performances.

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  • Hurley, Jessica. “History Is What Bites: Zombies, Race, and the Limits of Biopower in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 56.3 (Fall 2015): 311–333.

    DOI: 10.3828/extr.2015.17Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay parallels the fundamentally biological positioning of zombies as the “enemy that it is always necessary to kill for the good of the species, without question” and African Americans’ precariously marginalized position in American society. Hurley contends that in Zone One this parallel makes zombies the embodiment of a cultural sickness caused by denial of America’s racist history. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Levine, Andrea. “‘In His Own Home’: Gendering the African American Domestic Sphere in Contemporary Culture.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 39.1–2 (Spring/Summer 2011): 170–187.

    DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2011.0024Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay discusses Sag Harbor somewhat idiosyncratically, focusing less on the novel as a coming-of-age story and more on how and why the relative economic privilege of Sag Harbor’s black community fails to protect its female members “either from the violence of the public sphere or from the intimate gendered violences that often emerge in response to that public sphere” (p. 172). Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Li, Stephanie. “‘Sometimes Things Disappear’: Absence and Mutability in Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York.” In Literature after 9/11. Edited by Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, 82–98. New York: Routledge, 2008.

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    Although the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 are never explicitly mentioned in The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts, Li parallels the manner in which the absence of the Twin Towers gave them a new symbolic resonance after the attacks with the way Whitehead uses absences more generally in the book to create meaning through emotional associations.

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  • Libretti, Tim. “‘Verticality Is Such a Risky Enterprise’: Class Epistemologies and the Critique of Upward Mobility in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.” In Class and Culture in Crime Fiction: Essays on Works in English since the 1970s. Edited Julie H. Kim, 201–224. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014.

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    This essay argues that Whitehead’s alterations to and complications of the formulas of detective fiction in his debut novel are intended to undermine normative presumptions about both the possibility and desirability of upward class mobility. Libretti posits that Whitehead’s subversive tale “ratif[ies] different ways of knowing that implicitly endorse different political perspectives and material socioeconomic relationships” (p. 205).

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  • Rambsy, Howard, II. “The Rise of Colson Whitehead: Hi-Tech Narratives and Literary Ascent.” In New Essays on the African American Novel: From Hurston and Ellison to Morrison and Whitehead. Edited by Lovalerie King and Linda F. Selzer, 221–240. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

    DOI: 10.1007/978-0-230-61275-4_15Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay examines Whitehead’s rise to literary prominence—still somewhat moderate at the time compared to his lofty public status after The Underground Railroad—and looks specifically at what Rambsy calls his “hi-tech approaches to characterization and narrative design” (p. 221) as a salient factor in explaining the reaction of the publishing industry and academia to Whitehead’s first four books.

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  • Shermeyer, Kelli. “‘Systems Die Hard’: Resistance and Reanimation in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.” In The Written Dead: Essays on the Literary Zombie. Edited by Kyle William Bishop, William, Angela Tenga, and Robert G. Weiner, 120–132. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017.

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    This essay engages with the “politics of diagnosis” as depicted in Zone One. Shermeyer suggests that the psychological diagnosis of the fictional PASD (post-apocalyptic stress disorder) and the sociopolitical plan to reclaim and rebuild Lower Manhattan in the novel suffer from similarly rigid definitions of normalcy that ensure their failure to ameliorate the personal and social ills they respectively address.

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  • Tettenborn, Éva. “A mountain full of ghosts”: Mourning African American Masculinities in Colson Whitehead’s “John Henry Days.” African American Review 46.2–3 (Summer/Fall 2013): 271–284.

    DOI: 10.1353/afa.2013.0035Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This article contends that working-class African American masculinity is highly unlikely to receive either a sympathetic or accurate depiction within a white-dominated culture. To illustrate this point, Tettenborn looks at Whitehead’s fictionalization of Talcott, West Virginia, where the festival commemorating one of the major African American folk heroes takes place in John Henry Days. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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Utopia and Apocalypse

Compared to some of the other themes in Whitehead’s work, the related themes of utopianism and apocalypticism are somewhat less pervasive. Nevertheless, Grattan 2017 builds on critical foundation established by earlier critics (e.g., Bérubé 2004 and Selzer 2009, both cited under Race and Identity) in surveying the utopian and meta-utopian dimensions of Lila Mae Watson’s search for a possibly apocryphal manuscript on elevator design by her mentor in The Intuitionist (cited under Novels). Whitehead’s zombie-novel, Zone One (cited under Novels), provides fertile material for a range of critics, including Caracciolo 2018, Hicks 2016, Sollazzo 2017, and Sorensen 2014, all of which use the book’s postapocalyptic aspect as their central theme. Cvek 2014 combines the two discourses and looks at how utopianism and apocalypticism ironically intertwine in Zone One.

  • Caracciolo, Marco. “Negative Strategies and World Disruption in Postapocalyptic Fiction.” Style: A Quarterly Journal of Aesthetics, Poetics, Stylistics, and Literary Criticism 52.3 (2018): 222–241.

    DOI: 10.5325/style.52.3.0222Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay discusses Zone One, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (New York: Vintage, 2006), and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (New York: Knopf, 2014) as innovative postapocalyptic novels that achieve their sense of catastrophic disruption by repeatedly referring to the absence of the world that existed before their respective apocalypses took place. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Cvek, Sven. “Surviving Utopia in Zone One.” In Facing the Crises: Anglophone Literature in the Postmodern World. Edited by Ljubica Matek and Jasna Poljak Rehlicki, 2–14. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2014.

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    This essay looks at Zone One within two interrelated critical contexts that combine to form an antiutopian “Gothic Marxism.” Cvek argues that zombies serve not only as symbols of societal disease within contemporary capitalist economies but also that their broken minds and bodies become symbols for the tangible consequences to humanity of runaway materialism and its utopian promises.

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  • Grattan, Sean. “I Think We’re Alone Now: Solitude and the Utopian Subject in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.” Cultural Critique 96 (Spring 2017): 126–153.

    DOI: 10.5749/culturalcritique.96.2017.0126Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This article runs against the critical grain in emphasizing the potential of Lila Mae’s situation in The Intuitionist. Grattan sees her solitude not as exclusion, but rather a strategic withdrawal that lends hopeful prospects to her future. This piece is expanded in his Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature (Iowa City: Iowa University Press: 2017). Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Hicks, Heather J. The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity Beyond Salvage. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

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    Chapter 4 of this book looks at the manner in which Zone One participates in an artistic critique of the values that constitute modernity. Echoing the other chapters on works by Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Cormac McCarthy, Jeanette Winterson, and Paolo Bacigalupi, Hicks’s discussion of Whitehead’s novel considers the debatable merits of restoring the past destroyed by the zombies.

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  • Sollazzo, Erica. “‘The Dead City’: Corporate Anxiety and the Post-Apocalyptic Vision in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.” Law & Literature 29.3 (2017): 457–483.

    DOI: 10.1080/1535685X.2017.1327696Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This article argues that Whitehead’s depiction of a zombie apocalypse in Zone One draws on three real-world models—the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the financial crisis of the late 2000s, and the rapid contemporary gentrification of urban spaces—in order to critique the manner in which corporations wield undue and damaging influence in American society. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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  • Sorensen, Leif. “Against the Post-Apocalyptic: Narrative Closure in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.” Contemporary Literature 55.3 (September 2014): 559–592.

    DOI: 10.1353/cli.2014.0029Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This essay argues that Zone One is a metafiction that comments critically not just on the conditions that led to the zombie apocalypse it depicts, but also on the forms and premises of apocalyptic literature in general. Sorensen contends that the novel’s ambiguous ending reflects present-day American social anxieties about the uncertain future. Available online by purchase or subscription.

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