Despite their current resurgence across different media, dystopias are often suspected of undermining progressive action, due to their militant pessimism and their all-too frequent succumbing to despair. What kind of stories are most effective for envisioning a hopeful future when alternatives to the status quo are sorely needed? Few would turn to dystopian fiction for this specific purpose. I conclude with a discussion of time in Whitehead, arguing that his distinctive engagement with temporality lies at the heart of the vision of freedom after neoliberalism offered by his fiction. This novel, arriving a decade after Apex, shows Whitehead responding to changes in American society and culture-particularly the advent of Black Lives Matter and a growing public awareness of the implications of mass incarceration policies for African Americans-that seem to call for a more sincere reckoning with the notion of freedom. The Underground Railroad, by contrast, inhabits an African American literary genre-the novel of slavery-that is strongly wedded to discourses of bondage and freedom. The novel both pursues and treats critically a postmodern aesthetics that envisages symbolic action on language as the primary ground of politics.

I argue that in Apex-published against the background of the Bush doctrine and the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan-Whitehead treats freedom ironically.

I then undertake an extended comparison between Whitehead’s novels Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) and The Underground Railroad (2016). I begin by outlining some of the significations of ‘freedom’ within American culture before and during the period of neoliberal hegemony, placing particular emphasis on trends in the word’s provenance for African Americans between the civil rights era and the time in which Whitehead is writing. This essay explores the changing role played by the idea of freedom in the fiction of Colson Whitehead.

The underground railroad book online