Neo-Slave Narratives: Intergenerational Embodied Resistance in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

Abstract

The study examines intergenerational embodied resistance through the matrilineal lineage of three major protagonists: Ajarry, Mabel, and Cora in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. It reconceptualizes resistance as historically diffused and materially inscribed across successive generations of Black female bodies. Rather than considering embodied resistance as a discrete historical episode, the neo-slave narratives consider enslavement as an endless institution. The interlocking defiance of the characters in the novel across generations reveals resistance as inherited and cumulative, shaped by systemic slavery. In this regard, the study employs theoretical concepts of Michel Foucault’s “biopower,” Hortense J. Spillers’s “the flesh” and Christina Sharpe’s “the wake” to explore the persistent counterforce that the black protagonists embody in historical continuity and their transformative mode of obtrusiveness. Spillers’s notion of flesh exposes the primordial violence through which Black subjects, particularly women, are ungendered and commodified while Foucault’s concept of biopower elucidates how enslaved bodies are surveilled, disciplined, and controlled. Sharpe’s concept of the wake reveals slavery as an ongoing condition that continues to rupture and shape contemporary Black female life. In light of the analytical concepts, the study shows how trauma, dispossession, and resistance are transmitted across generations through Black female bodies. Thus, it contributes to scholarly literary discourse reconceptualizing resistance as an embodied, intergenerational process rather than an episodic one that features the Black female body as a critical site of violence, trauma, and agency.