![]() ![]() ![]() Still, reeling from her mother’s escape from slavery a few years earlier and tending the provisional ground first set out by her grandmother, Cora is a “stray,” cut off from the slave community and forced to live in a place called Hob, where “they banished the wretched” from everyday life on the plantation. ![]() The narrative picks up when the youngest, Cora, the protagonist, is in her mid-teens. The first 50 pages or so of The Underground Railroad are an extraordinary act of homage, a quiet pastiche of the novel of slavery in the wake of Morrison, focusing on three generations of enslaved women. ![]() Its claims about history and the present, however, are much less straightforward than some of the hype around the novel would suggest. In its scope and ambition, The Underground Railroad makes a bid to synthesize that long tradition of novel writing about slavery. African-American novelists have long been interested in the historical place of Black people in American life, and what Ashraf Rushdy calls the “neo-slave narrative” has been around since the 1960s, energized by Toni Morrison’s Beloved in the late 1980s. COLSON WHITEHEAD’S NEW NOVEL appears in the middle of what is starting to look like a vogue for African-American historical culture, marked in part by Hollywood films like 12 Years a Slave and Selma. ![]()
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