Colson Whitehead's History of the United States

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 Colson Whitehead’s History of the United States Alexander Manshel McGill University Picking a Genre Since the publication of his first novel twenty years ago, Colson Whitehead has become one of the most lauded, prized, taught, and studied American novelists writing today. Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant and the nearly-as-lucrative honor of Oprah’s Book Club, and the most contemporary novelist included in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Whitehead stands at the very center of the contemporary canon. According to critics and scholars alike, part of what makes Whitehead so singular is his ability to write across a vast array of literary and mass-cultural forms: detective and encyclopedic fiction (The Intuitionist [1999], John Henry Days [2001]), contemporary satire and the bildungsroman (Apex Hides the Hurt [2006], Sag Harbor [2009]), and more recently, postapocalyptic zombie fiction and the meta-slave narrative (Zone One [2011], The Underground Railroad [2016]). Indeed, Whitehead’s play with genre is so well-known and self-conscious that he has even joked about it publicly in the pages of The New York Times. Before the release of his zombie novel, Zone One, Whitehead published an essay titled “Picking a Genre” (2009), in which he describes his artistic process: “If you’re anything like me, figuring out what to write next can be a real hassle. To make things easier, I modified my dartboard a few years ago. Now, when I’m overwhelmed by the untold stories out there, I head down to the basement, throw a dart and see where it lands. Try it for yourself!” (23). What follows is a list of targets on that dartboard, both a catalog and a send-up of the genres that characterize contemporary American fiction: from the “Encyclopedic” novel for the “postmodern, or postmodern-curious,” to the “Ethnic Bildungsroman,” “Little Known Historical Fact,” and “Southern Novel of Black Misery” (23). Here Whitehead is satirizing not only his own career but also the phenomenon that critics such as Andrew Hoberek, Theodore Martin, and Jeremy Rosen have called the contemporary “genre turn”: that is, the spate of literary novelists in ...................................................................................................... ß MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlaa051 MELUS  Volume 00  Number 0  (2020) 1 Manshel 2 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 recent years who have drawn on the “frameworks” of mass-market genres (Rosen). By now, these so-called “literary genre writers” are familiar— Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, and Viet Thanh Nguyen—as is the array of those genres themselves: detective, dystopian, fantasy, Western, and postapocalyptic fiction. What interests me here, however, is the process by which historical fiction—despite its mass-market popularity and its “declasse” status for much of the twentieth century—has dropped off that list.1 After all, every one of the writers just mentioned has published a historical novel and in some cases, several. While Whitehead’s own oeuvre represents a veritable catalog of genres, it also chronicles nearly two hundred years of American history.2 If we rearrange his novels not by publication date but loosely by their historical settings, we end up following Whitehead from the slave narrative and folklore of the nineteenth century (The Underground Railroad and John Henry Days); to the hard-boiled, civil-rights noir and ethnic bildungsroman of the mid- and late twentieth century (The Intuitionist, Sag Harbor, and The Nickel Boys [2019]); to a kind of postapocalyptic history of the early twenty-first century (Zone One). From this vantage, it seems clear that Whitehead is not only a writer of genre fiction but a prolific writer of one genre in particular: historical fiction. Yet this is somehow not what we mean when we say that these literary novelists have “turned to genre.” Perhaps it is their historical fiction that we are referring to when we describe their work as “literary” in the first place. In the four decades since the early 1980s, the American literary field has become dominated, and increasingly defined, by fictions of history. During this period, novelists, prize committees, literary critics, and canon warriors seized on the prestige, authority, and pedagogical potential of historical fiction as a means of expanding the largely homogenous Anglophone literary canon, diversifying cultural and academic institutions, and defending the novel’s place in an increasingly competitive media ecology.3 While previous scholarship attributes the twentiethcentury novel’s fascination with history to a post-Cold War “absence of an overarching narrative” (Cohen 27), “symbolic compensation” for a postmodern “crisis” in historical consciousness (Jameson, Antinomies 259; Postmodernism 22), and shifting theories of historiography (Elias), this investigation contends that contemporary fiction’s historical turn is the product of a series of phenomena far more local to the literary field itself. These include structural changes in the National Endowment for the Arts, evolving notions of literary prestige in prize organizations such as the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and fundamental transformations in the scholarship and syllabi of university English departments—all of which have either expressly or implicitly promoted historical fiction as contemporary literature’s most prestigious and politically potent genre.4 Data gleaned from the Open Syllabus Project—an online resource that has aggregated more than 350,000 syllabi for university English courses—suggest that Colson Whitehead’s History of the United States Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 the majority of the most-taught novels published after 1945 (and the majority of the most-taught novels published after 1980) are set in the historical past.5 Likewise, my own research in the history of major literary prizes reveals that while historical fiction accounted for just over half of all novels shortlisted for a major American prize in the period between 1950 and 1980, the genre accounted for two-thirds of all finalists by the end of the 1980s. This trend only intensified at the turn of the twenty-first century, with novels set in the past comprising seventy percent of all US finalists since 1990 (reaching a whopping eighty percent in the first decade of the twenty-first century alone).6 While the literary history of the last forty years marks a tremendous increase in the recognition of minority writers within these institutions of cultural consecration, my research demonstrates that African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Native writers in this period have been canonized almost exclusively in the idiom of historical fiction.7 Of the ten most-taught novels by minority writers published after 1945, eight are historical (“Open”); of the fifty-five novels by minority writers to be shortlisted for a major American prize between 1980 and 2009, fifty-one—all but four—take place in the past. Within this context, an investigation into the historical survey course that Whitehead’s body of work represents—a kind of single-author syllabus of American history—can offer insight into not only one of the most important twenty-first-century novelists but also the larger structures of the contemporary literary field that Whitehead’s career indexes. Reading The Intuitionist as an academic satire that is both a product and an allegory of the campus canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s, I argue that Whitehead’s first book dramatizes contemporaneous debates over literary canon reformation in a formally inventive, and indeed Intuitionist-influenced, historical novel. Situating the novel in the context of Whitehead’s undergraduate years at Harvard College thus provides a new rubric for The Intuitionist and a historical account of the literary-sociological forces that have motivated American literature’s significant historical turn. Moving from the author’s first novel to one of his most recent, this investigation then turns to The Underground Railroad as a case study in twenty-first-century historical fiction and the hyper-canonical genre of the meta-slave narrative, after forty years in which both have proliferated tremendously. Focusing closely on the novel’s allusive and performative relationship to the genre it participates in, I argue that The Underground Railroad embodies both the recent history and the present limits of contemporary narratives of slavery. In other words, if The Intuitionist offers us a glimpse at the academic and aesthetic debates that launched the historical turn, The Underground Railroad serves as a testament to the ways in which that period and its logics have reshaped the contemporary literary field. 3 Manshel The Intuitionist narrates the investigations of Lila Mae Watson, a municipal elevator inspector in a thinly veiled version of New York. As the novel opens, the city is in crisis: torn asunder by the upcoming election for chair of the Elevator Inspectors Guild and the rival theoretical camps-cum-political parties that the two candidates represent. On one side, we have the Empiricists: long-dominant in the world of elevator inspection, invested in observable facts, and marked by both methodological and social conservatism. On the other side, we have the Intuitionists: the upstart underdogs of elevator maintenance who believe in “communicating with the elevator on a nonmaterial basis” (62) and boast (somewhat inexplicably) of “a 10 percent higher accuracy rate” (58). Lila Mae, we learn early on, is not only a devout Intuitionist but the first black woman inspector in the biz. To make matters even more interesting, the Fanny Briggs Building—the high-profile skyscraper named for an escaped slave who taught herself to read— for which Lila Mae is responsible has just suffered a catastrophic accident: an elevator in complete free fall. Critical accounts of The Intuitionist have read it variously as “a wry postmodern noir” (Berube 163), a “racial protest novel” with a “gothic sensibility” (Liggins 360), and a “not-quite-steampunk, alternative history of the future” (Saldıvar 7). Yet while many scholars have commented on the novel’s historical themes, nearly all have stopped short of calling it a (capital-“H,” capital-“N”) Historical Novel, preferring instead to read it—as an early Time magazine review did—as “the freshest racial allegory since Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man” (Kirn). One reason critics may prefer to read the novel as a kind of allegory seems to be the lack of consensus as to when, exactly, The Intuitionist takes place. The novel is set, Lauren Berlant states definitively, “around 1964” (71). Or, at least, in “something like 1960s New York” (Miller qtd. in Russell 48). Well, “1950’s or 60’s” (Liggins 361). Either that, or it’s “’40s-ish New York” (Russell 48), or “before . . . the 1940s” (Saldıvar 9), or “during the Harlem Renaissance” (Norman 156). To summarize, The Intuitionist is a novel of “the early twentieth century” (Lucas), the “post-Civil Rights era” (Elam 118), and “some unspecified mid-twentieth-century milieu” (J. Tucker 151). No wonder, then, that critics read the novel as an “allegory,” a “historical fantasia” set in “an alternative reality” (Kelly 3): in Whitehead’s world, history works differently. At first glance, The Intuitionist seems an easy target for Fredric Jameson’s wellknown critique of contemporary historical fiction—namely, that it traffics in “stylistic connotation . . . and pseudohistorical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history” (Postmodernism 20). The historical novel engages not the historical moment, in other words, but its aesthetic trappings—not the 1950s but what Jameson calls “1950s-ness” (19). To be sure, Whitehead’s novel is littered with periodizing references to fashion (“fedoraed 4 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 Intuitionist History Colson Whitehead’s History of the United States Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 men” [17] and “torpedo bras” [70]), popular culture (“big band music” [2] and “stickball” [191]), technology (“new watches equipped with . . . radium dials” [159], “fins on the cars” [163], an “icebox” and “milk bottle” [122]), and historical referents: we are told that one of Lila Mae’s professors had “been in the war” (99)—though not which war—and we catch a brief glimpse, at novel’s end, of Martin Luther King, Jr. (248). Jameson’s notion of “stylistic connotation” seems to run aground on The Intuitionist, a novel that—as critical confusion makes clear—connotes 1950s-ness, 1960s-ness, and 1920s-30s-40s-ness all at once. While the temporal indeterminacy of Whitehead’s novel has led critics to read it as a portrait of “an alternative reality,” what The Intuitionist ultimately represents is an alternative history of our own. Granted, looking only at the usual clues, the novel’s setting seems muddled and indecipherable. Yet, as in any great detective novel, the answer is hiding in plain sight. In its first paragraphs, Whitehead announces precisely when The Intuitionist takes place. In the novel’s opening scene, as Lila Mae first inspects the doomed Fanny Briggs elevator, the building’s superintendent asks, “You aren’t one of those voodoo inspectors, are you? Don’t need to see anything, you just feel it, right?” (7). When Lila Mae corrects him, saying that she practices Intuitionism rather than “voodoo,” the super adds: “I haven’t ever seen a woman elevator inspector before, let alone a colored one, but I guess they teach you all the same tricks” (8). This is the first of many instances in the novel where Lila Mae and the rest of The Intuitionist’s black cast are referred to as “colored.” What’s more, she’s the first “colored” woman in her field. Here Whitehead offers an alternative, but no less historically grounded, method of periodization. The Intuitionist takes place in the time of burgeoning integration, the time of “colored,” a term that Whitehead halfjokingly claims in a later essay “lasted 82.3 years” (“Living”). Whitehead also emphasizes this synchronicity on the level of the novel’s form, narrating the action of The Intuitionist in the perpetual present and collapsing multiple decades into a single novel temporality. In other words, what may seem like a playful pastiche of period styles is in fact a deadly serious historiographical claim: the novel nods to the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and the decades in between because that was precisely the period of so many African American “firsts.” In this way, The Intuitionist operates on a clear historical timeline, albeit one with a different structure than historical fiction as it is traditionally understood. Abandoning specific dates and coherent decade aesthetics, Whitehead offers an alternative to what we can think of as historical fiction’s latent “Empiricism”—that is, an Intuitionist historical novel. I will return to this idea later, looking closely at how The Intuitionist frustrates existing accounts of historical fiction. To fully appreciate just what kind of historical novel this is, however, we first need to go back in time ourselves—not to the period of desegregation in which it takes place but to another, far more animating context for The Intuitionist: the campus culture wars of the 1980s and early 1990s. 5 Manshel Escalator safety has never received its due respect. . . . But Chuck can live with the obscurity and disrespect and occasional migraines. Specialization means job security, and there’s a nationwide lack of escalator professors in the Institutes, so Chuck figures he’s a shoo-in for a teaching job. And once he’s in there, drawing a bead on tenure, he can branch out from escalators and teach whatever he wants. He probably even has his dream syllabus tucked in his pocket at this very moment, scratched on a cheap napkin. A general survey course on the history of hydraulic elevators. . . . Or hypothetical elevators; hypothetical elevator studies is bound to come back into vogue again, now that the furor has died down. Chuck’s assured Lila Mae that even though he is a staunch Empiricist, he’ll throw in the Intuitionist counterarguments where necessary. His students should be acquainted with the entire body of elevator knowledge, not just the canon. (21) As this last line makes clear, the battle between the Empiricists and the Intuitionists is being waged not only in municipal elections but also on the syllabus itself, much like the 1980s culture wars that displaced national political debate onto the English department and the substance of what was taught there. On the right, the group of conservative thinkers branded as “The Traditionalists” argued that the preservation of the Western—largely white and male—literary canon was essential to the project of national education. William Bennett claimed it was the university’s responsibility to uphold the “legacy” of the Western tradition currently being undermined by “respect for diversity” (29–30). Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind—published in 1987, the year Whitehead entered Harvard College—decried in even stronger 6 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 At the risk of adding still one more genre to Whitehead’s dartboard, I submit that The Intuitionist is, in large part, an academic satire: a campus novel and archival thriller shaped by Whitehead’s years at Harvard College and the canon wars that marked them. For as much as the present action of the novel narrates Lila Mae’s investigation of the Fanny Briggs elevator crash, that investigation itself hinges on the prominent theorists, ideological debates, and institutional histories of the academy—the elevator academy. The world of The Intuitionist may read as an “alternative reality” to some, but it is likely all too familiar to the scholars and students who hold it in their hands. As readers, we learn of “the early days of passenger-response criticism” (5). We hear of “Erlich,” the “mad” French theorist, who “never gets invited to conferences” and whose “monographs wilt on the shelves” (229). We even meet Ben Urich, a young writer desperate to publish in Lift, the leading professional journal, but willing to place his article in “one of the smaller elevator newsletters who don’t pay as well and have a smaller circulation” (72). Whitehead’s mirror-image academy is perhaps best captured in one early passage, when the narrator describes Lila Mae’s colleague, Chuck, who harbors a passion for an overlooked corner of the profession, the field of escalator studies: Colson Whitehead’s History of the United States Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 terms multiculturalism’s “demagogic intention . . . to force students to recognize that . . . Western ways are not better” (36). Focusing on contemporary prize culture in particular, Carol Iannone’s 1991 essay “Literature by Quota” contended that a “new order” ruled by the “democratic dictatorship of mediocrity” had taken over the nation’s major literary awards, transforming them into “less a recognition of literary achievement than some official act of reparation” (50–51).8 Responding in part to the rise of black and ethnic studies curricula that grew from student activism of the 1960s and 1970s, the Traditionalists’ sneering at “diversity” and “reparation” appears now as little more than a racially coded backlash couched in the language of academic debate. In this way, the Traditionalists are not unlike Whitehead’s very own Empiricists, who label their intellectual rivals as “swamis, voodoo men, juju heads, [and] witch doctors” (Intuitionist 57). Sounding as much like Bennett or Bloom as he does more contemporary conservatives, the leader of the Empiricist party—the aptly named Frank Chancre—advocates for tradition in the key of racist dog whistle: “[S]ometimes the old ways are the best ways. Why hold truck with the uppity and newfangled when Empiricism has always been the steering light of reason? Just like it was in our fathers’ day, and our fathers’ fathers’. Today’s [accident] is just the kind of unfortunate mishap that can happen when you kowtow to the latest fashions” (27). Make Elevators Great Again. Meanwhile, on the left, the multiculturalists and New Historicists pushed not only for a diversification of the curriculum but also for an end to the practices of reading in isolation that they saw as a kind of ethical failure. From Jameson’s commandment at the start of the decade—Always Historicize!—to the New Historicist approaches that largely defined it, a surge of literary scholarship worked to “combat empty formalism by pulling historical considerations to the center stage of literary analysis” (Veeser xi). Joseph North has recently described this period as the beginning of the “historicist/contextualist paradigm” in literary studies, a program that prizes historicity over aesthetics, celebrates “the opening up of the canon,” and dominates the discipline to this day (8). It is important to note that, for all of the disagreement between the right’s ethnicized traditionalism and the left’s multiculturalist revisionism, both sides had one thing in common. Whether literature served as a testament to racial and national preeminence in a global meritocracy or worked instead to identify and redress systems of inequality, both sides mobilized it against what they described as a contemporary culture of forgetting. Central to the arguments of Bennett and the like was the idea that “students [simply cannot] understand their society without studying its intellectual legacy. If their past is hidden from them, they will become aliens in their own culture, strangers in their own land” (30). Likewise, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argued in his book Loose Canons (1993) that 7 Manshel This agreement—perhaps the only one between Bennett and Gates—is crucial to understanding the origins of American literature’s historical turn. Given that the two sides of the canon wars were united in their desire for a renewed historical consciousness (however variously defined), it comes as little surprise that, as literature became the central battleground of political debate, historical fiction arose as the dominant—and, indeed, ideal—literary genre to mediate that debate. After all, what better way for the left to dispute the critique that literary multiculturalism was both erasing history and sacrificing quality than to prize, study, and teach a new canon of novels deeply concerned with the historical past and therefore imbued with the authority that its historicity affords? John Guillory has argued that “a syllabus of study always enacts a negotiation between historical works and modern works” (51), and that “obviously in order to ‘open’ [the literary] canon, one would have to modernize it, to displace the preponderance of works from earlier to later” (32). Although this seems obvious, it is not entirely accurate. Yes, to diversify the list of authors taught in the university English classroom, it is necessary to devote greater attention to periods in which black and brown writers had at least a modicum of access to the means of literary production. That said, what better way to mitigate this necessary modernization than by canonizing minority authors almost exclusively for the writing of historical fiction? For example, Toni Morrison’s Beloved may have been published in 1987, but it is also a novel of the nineteenth century. In this way, the institutions of literary studies in the 1980s and early 1990s—torn between competing impulses to simultaneously modernize and historicize—were able to both have and eat their cake by baking heirloom recipes. For Whitehead, these battles in the culture wars were not merely part of some vague historical background but raging in front of him on the Harvard College campus, where he studied from 1987 to 1991. A quick glance at the archives of the Harvard Crimson bears this out, as headlines drawn from just a few weeks in Whitehead’s junior year demonstrate: harsh critiques and impassioned defenses of political correctness (“‘Politically Correct’ Thought Control,” “Two Views on PC Ideology”); a campus controversy over the public hanging of a confederate flag (“The Flag is Harassment”); debates over affirmative action and faculty hiring (“Affirmative Action Debated,” “Educators Urge Women, Minority Role Models”); even Harvard’s own African American “first” (“Obama Named New Law Review President”). That said, the tense campus climate was nowhere 8 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 this is one case where we’ve got to borrow a leaf from the right, which is exemplarily aware of the role of education in the reproduction of values. We must engage in this sort of canon deformation precisely because Mr. Bennett is correct: the teaching of literature is the teaching of values; . . . it has become . . . the teaching of an aesthetic and political order, in which no women or people of color were ever able to discover the reflection or representation of their images, or hear the resonances of their cultural voices. (35) Colson Whitehead’s History of the United States Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 more apparent than in the English and African American studies departments where Whitehead took most of his classes. In the editorial pages of the Crimson, English majors decried the department’s core curriculum, which they saw as overly Western, white, and male.9 We hear an echo of this—and, perhaps, of Whitehead’s own experience—in The Intuitionist, as Lila Mae begins her course of study: She learned plenty her first semester at the Institute for Vertical Transport. She learned about the animals in the Roman coliseums hoisted to their cheering deaths on rope-tackle elevators powered by slaves, learned about Villayer’s “flying chair,” a simple . . . counterweight concoction described in a love letter from Napoleon I to his wife, the Archduchess Marie Louise. . . . She read about Elisha Graves Otis [and] the cities he enabled through his glorious invention. . . . The rise of safety regulation, safety device innovations, the search for a national standard. She was learning about Empiricism but didn’t know it yet. (44–45) Notice the Institute’s insistence on the western European roots of elevator studies, the pioneering “innovations” of white Americans, and the development of Bennett-esque “national standards.” Before Lila Mae is exposed to the iconoclastic and liberatory curriculum of Intuitionism, she is steeped in an Empiricist tradition so naturalized that it is effectively invisible. In interviews, Whitehead describes moving beyond Harvard’s core curriculum, taking classes in both English and African American studies that focused more on contemporary literature and far more on black authors.10 Just as Lila Mae discovers the work of James Fulton and his theory of Intuitionism, Whitehead himself found writers and thinkers that transformed him. In fact, Whitehead’s reading as an undergraduate makes itself apparent throughout The Intuitionist, which alludes to many of the authors he first encountered at Harvard and still counts among his greatest influences. The novel is littered with citations, from Lila Mae’s resemblance to Oedipa Maas of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) and her favorite lunch spot in “the Metzger building” (20) to the Intuitionist society’s chief counsel, Mr. Jameson, and lead advisor, Mr. Reed—that is, Ishmael Reed, whom Whitehead regularly cites as a particularly important influence and an “overlooked” and “groundbreaking voice in black fiction” (Whitehead, “Going”). Even the Fanny Briggs building, the site of the novel’s inciting elevator crash, bears the traces of Whitehead’s Harvard syllabi, located as it is at “125 Walker” (Whitehead, Intuitionist 1–2), a nod to the author of The Color Purple (1982) and a neighbor to what is perhaps the most famous street address in African American literature: 124 Bluestone Road. In fact, in the spring of his junior year, as Whitehead was enrolled in Harvard’s “Introduction to African American Literature” course, Toni Morrison visited campus to give a series of lectures that would ultimately become Playing in the 9 Manshel 10 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), her now-canonical book of essays on American literature’s racial imaginary.11 In the lectures, Morrison reveals what she calls the “abiding . . . Africanist presence” in the work of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, and Ernest Hemingway, staging an intervention in contemporary literary studies by way of a return to American literary history (5). Ultimately, Morrison both models and advocates a new wave of scholarship committed to excavating black history from the American literary canon. As Morrison herself put it that spring at Harvard, “Criticism of this type will show how . . . narrative is used in the construction of a history and a context for whites by positing history-lessness and context-lessness for blacks” (Playing 53). Regardless of whether Whitehead was in the room, Morrison’s call for a renewed investment in black literary history would have appeared all the more pressing to students of African American literature at Harvard given that the university’s “Afro-American Studies” department was in the midst of an existential crisis (Palmore). Like the elevator institute’s courses on Intuitionism—which Whitehead tells us “were always . . . full” despite being relegated to “the dingy recesses of the course catalog” and even dingier classrooms (Intuitionist 59)— Afro-American Studies at Harvard in 1990 enjoyed a wealth of student interest but little institutional support.12 Hardly a month passed in Whitehead’s last semesters when the department’s ever-dwindling faculty was not making campus news. In Whitehead’s final year, when “Afro-Am” was poised to retain only a single tenured professor, student protestors occupied campus buildings, marched through football games, and appealed to the Cambridge city council for support. According to intrepid student reporter Rebecca Walkowitz, the administration swung into action as demonstrations escalated, extending a handful of offers, including one to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (“Afro-Am Activists,” “Afro-Am Beginning”). As the Crimson’s headline—“Can He Save Afro-Am?”—suggests, Gates’s acceptance was big news at Harvard. Asked to comment on the announcement, Morrison offered that the union of Gates and Harvard was “a perfect marriage” (Barnes). It is helpful to return to Gates not only because his impending arrival at Harvard would have caught the interest of “Afro-Am” student Colson Whitehead but also because his writing from this period includes a somewhat surprising intertext for The Intuitionist. Published in the March 1990 issue of The New York Times Book Review, and again in 1992 as the opening chapter of Loose Canons, “Canon Confidential” was Gates’s own attempt to recompose the canon wars in the key of detective noir. In brief, the short story follows private detective Sam Slade as he works to uncover the forces that destine works either for posterity or for the pulp mill. Like The Intuitionist, Gates’s academic satire is littered with cameos: Helen Vendler has Slade bounced from the Harvard Club; Jacques Barzun holds him up with a .38; and Harold Bloom, who we are told Colson Whitehead’s History of the United States Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 has a “rap sheet longer than a three-part New Yorker profile,” is wanted for multiple murders, chief among them T. S. Eliot’s (8). Eventually, Slade confronts the figure behind the entire canon cabal, described as a small, old man in an “enormous . . . leather chair” (10). “[D]on’t [you] understand how big this thing is,” he says. “We’ve got people all over. . . . We’ve got the daily reviewers, . . . the literature profs at your colleges, . . . [t]he guys who edit the anthologies—Norton, Oxford, you name it—they all work for us” (10–11). In the end, he even buys off Slade, offering him a spot in the canon himself and the opportunity to be “deconstructed, reconstructed and historicized in PMLA” (14). In this way, the arc of “Canon Confidential” offers a stark contrast to Whitehead’s own canon noir. Unlike Sam Slade, whose struggle for the truth leads him into the heart of a vast literary conspiracy, Lila Mae’s investigations return her, again and again, to the university and its history. As The Intuitionist builds toward a close, Lila Mae draws repeatedly on her scholarly training as she works to track down the lost papers of Intuitionism’s founding theorist, the late James Fulton. Performing what can only be described as archival research, Lila Mae scours institutional documents, deciphers manuscript marginalia, and pores over old issues of Lift. Piecing together the gaps in Fulton’s biography, Lila Mae ultimately discovers a startling secret: James Fulton, institute professor and Intuitionist thinker, was in fact a black man passing for white. Just as Morrison argues of literary history in Playing in the Dark, here the elevator’s own history of innovation harbors an overlooked but “abiding . . . Africanist presence” (5). In the shadow of this knowledge, which Whitehead describes as “reconnoting” all that Lila Mae has ever been taught, Fulton’s description of a “race . . . stirred by dreaming . . . this dream of uplift” accrues a far deeper meaning (Intuitionist 186). Confronted with this new perspective on history, Lila Mae is forced to “[teach] herself how to read” all over again (186). Realizing that the archive can only take her so far—its dates and facts the last vestiges of her Empiricist education—Lila Mae returns to the Fanny Briggs Building in an effort to commune firsthand with history. From the very start of the novel, the high-rise figures as what Morrison has elsewhere called a “site of memory,” taking its name from a runaway slave who, like Lila Mae, “taught herself to read” (12). Its lobby features a grand historical mural that is as ambitious as it is selective: jumping quickly from “the infamous sale of the island” to a “nice setpiece” on the Revolution (47). However, Whitehead tell us, “the painting ended there. . . . Judging from the amount of wall space that remained[,] . . . the mural would have to [become] even more brief in its chronicle. . . . Either the painter had misjudged how much space he had or the intervening years weren’t that compelling to him. Just the broad strokes, please” (48). In this way, the Fanny Briggs Building stands as a towering symbol of the losses and omissions etched into its very design. 11 Manshel This is the wrong darkness. It is the darkness of this day and this time and this elevator and Lila Mae needs that further-back darkness, the one she encountered on her first visit to Fanny Briggs. . . . She imagines her hand extending out to the unyielding solidity of that dead elevator’s walls, the way the inner paneling embraced her hand’s curves. . . . It is a slow curtain dropping before this day’s darkness. There. . . . She watches the sure and untroubled ascent of Number Eleven. The genies appear on cue, dragging themselves from the wings. The genie of velocity, the genie of the hoisting motor’s brute exertions, the red cone genie of the selector as it ticks off the entity’s progress through the shaft, the amber nonagon genie of the grip shoes as they skip frictionless up T-rails. All of them energetic and fastidious, describing seamless verticality to Lila Mae in her mind’s own tongue. They zigzag and circle, hop from foot to foot. . . . They gyrate . . . and reenact without omission. (226) The first and most obvious thing to say about this passage is that it is likely the most beautiful description of an elevator in all of English letters. Moving beyond the archive and its documentary evidence, Lila Mae reconstructs the past by communing with it firsthand (literally). Unlike the Empiricists who “imagined elevators from [an] . . . inherently alien point of view,” here “reenactment” is a tactile experience, an empathic one (62). Clearly, Whitehead’s protagonist has not only taught herself “how to read” (182) but also how to close read, deconstructing the elevator’s passage and examining its previously overlooked constituent parts. Dredging the past from the darkness that obscures it, Lila Mae transcends the lobby mural fourteen floors below, discovering here a history “without omission.” I want to return now to the idea with which I began: that Whitehead’s novel represents a kind of Intuitionist historical fiction set in the desegregation of midcentury but structured according to the logics of the canon wars at that century’s close. Bearing the traces of the multiculturalist and New Historicist programs that marked Whitehead’s development as a thinker and writer, The Intuitionist works to reenact history and resurrect figures such as Lila Mae Watson, James Fulton, and Fanny Briggs—not from “an alien point of view” but from a new perspective using novel techniques. As Whitehead puts it in his final pages, “Intuitionism is communication. That simple. Communication with what is not-you” (241). In its rejection of empiricist principles, The Intuitionist frustrates previous accounts of historical fiction in ways that are representative of the genre writ large at the turn of the twenty-first century. Georg Lukacs argues that the protagonist of the historical novel must be a “middling” figure, “never heroic” but thrust into a decisive moment of historical transition (33). By contrast, Whitehead’s protagonist is not at all “middling” but exemplary: the first black woman to break into her 12 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 It is here that Whitehead stages the climax of the novel: its first and only demonstration of Intuitionism. As Lila Mae begins “her reenactment” of the building’s catastrophic elevator crash, she “shuts [everything] out,” “closes her eyes,” and “reaches out into the darkness” (226). Whitehead writes: Colson Whitehead’s History of the United States Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 field and a rising hero of new theoretical methods. Moreover, although Whitehead’s portrait of desegregation depicts just such a “transition,” the novel’s indeterminate setting undermines the idea of neat historical breaks, pointing up the uneven and often illusory qualities of progress. While Jameson has derided contemporary historical fiction for what he calls its “‘nostalgia’ art language” (Postmodernism 19) and its “random cannibalization of . . . the styles of the past” (18), Whitehead interleaves a range of period styles in part to critique such nostalgia as a weapon of conservatism seeking to revert to the time of “our fathers . . . and our fathers’ fathers’” (Intuitionist 27). If the novel appears to abandon what Jameson has described as “the American history we learn from schoolbooks” (Postmodernism 22), that is because Whitehead is arguing that we need better schoolbooks. In this way, The Intuitionist takes its cues from Gates, “deforming” canonical history in order to recuperate the “resonances of . . . cultural voices” previously unheard (Gates 35). Likewise, the novel literalizes, narrativizes, Morrison’s arguments from Playing in the Dark, not only recognizing the historically invisible but also drafting a new history that centralizes them. As one character says of Fulton: “What he made, this elevator, colored people made that. It’s ours” (Whitehead, Intuitionist 139). Whitehead’s novel is both historiographical and metafictional but not in the ways that Linda Hutcheon and Amy Elias have described.13 For Hutcheon, postmodern historical fiction points up the “textual” nature of history, stressing that the past is fundamentally unstable and inaccessible. As Elias puts it: “[P]ostmodern literature seems hyperconsciously aware that the drive to write and know history may be a futile endeavor, at worst an imperialist drive to control the past, at most a Hollywood-inspired move to profit from history’s . . . simulation” (xvii). In The Intuitionist, however, the drive to “write and know history” is not at all futile but central to Whitehead’s anti-imperialist project. As the novel makes clear, for that project to succeed, history cannot remain forever inaccessible. Like his protagonist, Whitehead has to reach out through “that further-back darkness” to lay hands on the “unyielding solidity” of the past (226). In the final pages of The Intuitionist, Lila Mae returns once again to “her alma mater, the Institute for Vertical Transport” (230). Yet this time she arrives not as a student but as a scholar of Intuitionism, drawing on her training to fill in the gaps in the historical record and sitting down to write Fulton’s lost third volume herself. If the bulk of the novel is consumed with the process of her education and the scholarly debates that shaped it, its conclusion finds Whitehead’s protagonist—like Whitehead himself—renewing a tradition of black authors and academics by writing backward into the past. 13 Manshel While Whitehead has garnered considerable recognition and prestige throughout his career, his recent foray into the hyper-canonical genre of the meta-slave narrative is—by virtually any measure—his most successful novel to date. Lauded by critics and scholars alike, The Underground Railroad won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, and is currently being adapted for television by Barry Jenkins, the Academy Awardwinning director of Moonlight (2016). In an August 2016 interview on CBS This Morning—itself a measure of the novel’s national and mass-market attention—Whitehead explained that “the response [to the book] has been just so different and new” (“Oprah”). Indeed, as scholars and reviewers have pointed out, it is more than a little ironic that an author who once lampooned the ubiquity of the “Southern Novel of Black Misery” can now count his own experiment in that quadrant of the genre “dartboard” as a literary blockbuster. Although six books and sixteen years passed between the publication of The Intuitionist and The Underground Railroad, Whitehead’s two novels appear as fraternal twins—or perhaps two halves of a literary slant rhyme—which illuminate the trajectory of the author’s career and the evolution of the literary field that has canonized him. Both novels narrate the lives of black women on the run; both blend historicity and fabulation to amend the historical record of the United States; and both rely on anachronism, and the temporally indeterminate settings it produces, to critique the idea of progress. Yet if Whitehead’s first novel offers us a glimpse at the canon wars that partly launched the historical turn in American literature, The Underground Railroad figures as a testament to the ways in which that period and its logics have reshaped the contemporary literary field. In the nearly three decades since Morrison’s and Gates’s (and countless others’) calls for a revised literary canon that revives the lost histories of people of color, historical fiction by minority writers (as evidenced by the syllabi and prize figures cited above) has become more or less the rule in the contemporary canon. In this context, the meta-slave narrative—arguably the most prestigious literary genre of the last half century—stands as a shining example of the aesthetic, political, and pedagogical potential of the historical novel and its sub-genres. In recent years, however, scholars and critics have called into question both the centrality and the significance of contemporary narratives of slavery. Stephen Best has critiqued the “primacy [of slavery] in black critical thought” and the “unassailable truth that the slave past provides a ready prism for apprehending the black political present” (63). Aida Levy-Hussen has likewise worked “to interrogate the premise that reexperiencing historical pain is transformative and necessary” and investigate “how therapeutic reading’s claim to moral urgency may inadvertently produce rote habits of canon construction and interpretation, 14 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 Living History Colson Whitehead’s History of the United States Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 blinding us to contemporaneous works of African American fiction that expressly disavow an orientation toward the past” (How 6). While Best and Levy-Hussen might read The Underground Railroad’s tremendous reception as still more evidence of the phenomena they describe, the novel itself appears markedly aware of both the legacy and the limits of the meta-slave narrative genre.14 Like The Intuitionist, Whitehead’s contemporary narrative of slavery nods to its literary forebearers, many of which the author first encountered as an undergraduate. Whitehead cites his reading of Harriet Jacobs during his junior year as “the inspiration for the North Carolina chapter” of the novel, in which his protagonist, Cora, seeks refuge from her captors by hiding away in an attic (Whitehead, “Imaginative”). As with Jacobs, Cora’s “only source of light and air was a hole in the wall that faced the street”—a hole, Whitehead adds, which was “carved from the inside, the work of a previous occupant. . . . [Cora] wondered where the person was now” (Underground 154). Although the novel alludes throughout to nonfictional slave narratives of the nineteenth century, its main intertexts are the meta-slave narratives of the late twentieth century, chief among them Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976) and Morrison’s Beloved. Cora’s main companion in the novel is Caesar, a man who Whitehead tells us was born into slavery on the farm of one “Mrs. Garner” (49). In this way, Whitehead inscribes in the central character nearly the entire history of the slave narrative in English: his first name drawn from the protagonist of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), and his last from the “Sweet Home men” of Morrison’s novel published three centuries later. Although it is altogether unsurprising that Morrison’s masterpiece—the single most-taught American novel published after 1945 (“Open”)—would loom large in the mind of any writer approaching the meta-slave narrative genre, Whitehead’s attention to Beloved is nonetheless remarkable. While the novel does not appear in the acknowledgments section of The Underground Railroad, it sat above Whitehead’s writing desk, alongside works by historians Eric Foner and Edward Baptist (which do appear) as Whitehead wrote the book (Schuessler). In interviews, Whitehead has likewise referred back to Morrison, remarking, “You have to do your own thing, right? Morrison already wrote Beloved; you’re not going to compete with that” (McCarthy). Even Whitehead’s longtime friend, the poet Kevin Young, has praised The Underground Railroad in distinctly Morrisonian terms: “Reading the book, I thought, he’s written his ‘Beloved’” (Schuessler). Taken together, these allusions—both within the pages of Whitehead’s novel and without—suggest that thirty years after Beloved, the literary genre that it metonymizes now stands overshadowed, and indeed overdetermined, by it. To put it simply, Whitehead’s continual citation suggests that, to some extent, one can no longer write meta-slave narratives, only metameta-slave narratives. The most compelling scenes in the novel do not occur underground, as it were, but in the “squat limestone building” in South Carolina where Cora works as a 15 Manshel 16 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 reenactor in the “Living History” division of the “Museum of Natural Wonders” (White, Underground 108–09). The purpose of the museum—its director, the Boston-transplant Mr. Fields, explains to Cora—is to educate the (white) citizens of South Carolina about the history of their “young nation”: “Like a railroad, [Fields explained,] the museum permitted them to see the rest of the country beyond their small experience. . . . And to see its people. ‘People like you’” (109). In reality, the museum appears less like the railroad that names the novel than it does the historical mural in the Fanny Briggs building: from “Plymouth rock” to the Boston Tea Party, the museum professes to “illuminate the American experience . . . [and] the truth of the historical encounter,” but it is structured exclusively by white, Western, and colonial narratives of the nation and its past (115–16). In order to make this history, in all its inaccuracy, come to life, Cora works as one of “three actors, or types as [Mr. Fields] referred to them,” in a trio of exhibits: “Scenes from Darkest Africa,” “Life on the Slave Ship,” and “Typical Day on the Plantation” (110; emphasis added). Lee Konstantinou has argued that unlike “a run-of-the-mill postmodern simulacrum,” “[t]he point of this episode . . . is to highlight how the Museum unambiguously falsifies slavery” (18). While this is certainly correct—Cora remarks, while working at the museum, that “Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking” (Whitehead, Underground 116)—it overlooks a central aspect of the episode and a large part of its “point”: Cora’s experience of reifying the museum’s distorted historical narratives. In each of the three “scenes” that she performs, Cora encounters the reality, not of “official” accounts of the past but of her interpellation by them in the present. In “Scenes from Darkest Africa,” Cora is asked to reenact a life that she has never known. Under the “peaked thatch roof” and amid the “assorted tools, gourds, and shells”—all, presumably, taken by force, as Cora’s grandmother Ajarry was—Cora is “reminded” only of “the buzzards that chewed the flesh of the plantation dead when they were put on display” (109–10). On the “frigate’s deck” of “Life on the Slave Ship” (110), Cora reckons with the fact that, while the museum’s “whites were made of plaster, wire, and paint” (115), as a black woman, she is coerced into repeatedly reperforming the trauma of slavery. Although “Typical Day on the Plantation” replaces the nightmare of the novel’s Randall plantation with a pastoral fantasy of work at a “spinning wheel,” Whitehead suggests that both the impetus for and the effect of Mr. Fields’s historical fiction are no less pernicious. Fields’s desire to instrumentalize the black women around him is not unlike the Randalls’, wishing “that he could fit an entire field of cotton in the display and had the budget for a dozen actors to work it.” For Cora, playing the role that she once lived is both physically and psychologically damaging: “Typical Day’s wardrobe . . . was made of coarse, authentic negro cloth. [Cora] burned with shame twice a day when she stripped and got into Colson Whitehead’s History of the United States Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 her costume” (110). The scene may be fabricated, in other words, but the pain and shame are no less “authentic.” In this way, Whitehead’s Museum of Natural Wonders both literalizes and critiques what Levy-Hussen describes as “the role of pain in [literary] fantasies of historical repair” (How 6), the idea that “feeling historical pain is a requisite component of [that] pain’s alleviation” (53). While the “therapeutic reading” of “black literary studies’ historical turn” suggests that Cora’s fictive simulation is necessary in order to heal (6), Whitehead argues here that slavery’s reenactment—unavoidably mediated by a racialized marketplace and white spectators “bang[ing] on the glass”—can be injurious to the individual and to the collective (Underground 110). If Morrison’s concept of “rememory” has worked since the 1980s to bring the atrocities of American slavery back to life (and further forward, into national consciousness), Whitehead’s “Living History” claims three decades later that their continual reviving is not unequivocally productive, especially when pressed into the service of specious narratives of progress. “In the fields,” Whitehead writes, “[Cora] was ever under the merciless eye of the overseer or boss. ‘Bend your backs!’ ‘Work that row!’ . . . Her recent installation in the exhibition returned her to the furrows of Georgia, the dumb, open-jawed stares of the patrons stealing her back to a state of display” (125). Here again, The Underground Railroad works as both a novel instance of the meta-slave narrative and a fictional interrogation of that genre’s present “state of display.”15 For Cora, the best mode of resistance is to disrupt the chronology of the historical script she is given, following instead a reversed “progression from Plantation to Slave Ship to Darkest Africa [that] generated a soothing logic.” This “unwinding of America,” Whitehead explains, “never failed to cast her into a river of calm, the simple theater becoming more than theater, a genuine refuge” (116). Likewise, Whitehead himself works to disrupt normative historical narratives in and through the novel to varying degrees of success. As in The Intuitionist, the setting of The Underground Railroad is temporally complex, blending and juxtaposing historical referents from the Fugitive Slave Law of the antebellum period (128) and Klan violence under Jim Crow (81) to the Tuskegee syphilis study and programs of forced sterilization that continued into the mid-1970s (113–17, 121–22). The climax of the novel even alludes to the uniquely (and shamefully) American phenomenon of contemporary mass shootings, particularly the 2015 Charleston church massacre that took the lives of nine African American worshippers (285–88). While the multiple periodizing details of The Intuitionist place the novel in a temporally indeterminate “time of integration,” these historical prolepses appear, in the context of The Underground Railroad’s far more stable antebellum setting, far more akin to the anachronisms of Reed’s Flight to Canada. In Reed’s self-described “neo-slave narrative,” runaway slaves literally take flight aboard Air Canada jetliners heading north, abolitionist poems are xeroxed, 17 Manshel In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning #1 New York Times bestseller The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead 18 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 and Abraham Lincoln is assassinated live on satellite television. These jarring moments recur with such frequency in Reed’s book—a novel as interested in Nixon’s administration as Lincoln’s—that Elias has suggested that “the novel may actually be set in the late twentieth century,” with the anachronism emerging counterintuitively from “the antebellum features of the text.” In Flight to Canada, Elias argues, “the time of slavery, in many ways, is now” (113–14). Whereas Reed’s anachronisms function primarily as tethers to the present, however, Whitehead’s seem instead to gather multiple pasts under the rubric of the history of slavery. Unlike other twenty-first-century meta-slave narratives—such as Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003) and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016)—Whitehead’s novel does not so much trace the legacies of slavery across multiple generations as it does collapse those legacies into the time of slavery itself. While Reed’s and Gyasi’s protagonists find a kind of freedom eventually, either in Canada or in the generations to come, Whitehead’s Cora never reaches “The North,” even in the novel’s final section, which bears that ambiguous title. By contrast, The Underground Railroad closes with Cora heading not north but west, a deviation from the genre’s geographic and thematic telos, and a suggestion that Cora’s “northern fantasy” is ultimately just that (171). Although American slave narratives, in both their nineteenth- and twentieth-century formulations, have also functioned as narratives of liberation, The Underground Railroad, for all its movement across space and time, never fully departs from the context of slavery. On its face, this reads as a reiteration of Whitehead’s argument in The Intuitionist that narratives of neat historical progress are often illusory and always more complicated than they appear. Yet it also underlines the suspicion that, unlike Cora hitching her wagon to the promise of California, Whitehead is not entirely sure where to go next. As much as The Underground Railroad evokes the history of contemporary American fiction’s most prestigious genre, it also points up—often self-consciously—the limits of that genre at present. If, after Douglass and Jacobs and Reed and Morrison, the literary history of American slavery can only ever function as allusive, metafictional, and self-referential reenactment, then despite the genre’s commercial and critical success—or perhaps because of it—The Underground Railroad may figure both as “Whitehead’s Beloved” and (to borrow from Best) “the epitaph to the Beloved moment” (72). In July 2019, Whitehead’s seventh novel, The Nickel Boys, was published to great acclaim. Months before the book—which went on to become both a bestseller and a prizewinner—was released, the publisher’s promotional copy hailed the novel as a sequel of sorts, the next chapter in an ambitious historical survey: Colson Whitehead’s History of the United States Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. . . . The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers. (“Nickel”) The week before The Nickel Boys was published, Whitehead was similarly lauded on the cover of Time magazine as “America’s Storyteller” and “one of the greatest [writers] of his generation,” particularly for his gifts in “mining the past” (Jackson). It is not yet clear what shape Whitehead’s career will take in the end. At only fifty years of age, he still has a lot of writing left to do, a great many more darts to throw. Yet, as one of the most celebrated American novelists of the twenty-first century, and as a central figure in contemporary fiction’s pervasive historical turn, Whitehead appears—at least for the time being—to have found his bull’s-eye. Notes 1. For a brief yet dazzling history of the historical novel in English, see Perry Anderson. 2. See Stephanie Li for an analysis of Colson Whitehead’s play with genre. “By presenting genre as a form of drag,” Li argues, “Whitehead affirms the performative nature of the cultural codes that instantiate literary categories. . . . Just as drag queens cause ‘gender trouble,’ Whitehead’s literary drag instills in readers and critics alike a good deal of genre trouble” (1). 3. Breaking away from more narrow definitions of the historical novel, my research takes as historical fiction works that self-consciously signify their historicity through world events or period styles; or, to borrow from Gerard Genette, “[any] narrative . . . that is explicitly placed (even by only one date) in a historical past, even a very recent one” (80). 4. While the National Endowment for the Arts lauds its own “anonymous process in which the sole criterion for review is artistic excellence,” it is also committed to “ensur[ing] the diversity of the group of writers to whom [it awards] grants” (“NEA” 3–4). To meet these divergent goals, ethnicized history—whether of the Holocaust, the Trujillo regime, or the antebellum plantation—has been recruited by the NEA as a tool in selecting a diverse array of fellowship recipients: a “blind” submission process assisted (or perhaps circumvented) by each work’s all-too-telling historical setting. Up until the early 1970s, a writer had to be nominated “by an established writer” to be considered for an NEA Literature Fellowship, a process that presumably privileged well-connected, which is to say white and male, writers. Between the mid1970s and the early 1980s, however, this process was superseded by an “open application policy.” Moreover, a 1979 report on the NEA by the House Appropriations Committee included a number of recommendations “on the 19 Manshel 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 20 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 5. question of minority representation” within the organization, advocating for “selecting minority individuals who have a definite identification with disadvantaged groups.” This led to the appointment of writers such as Toni Morrison to the Literature Program advisory panel, where she served from 1980 to 1987 (Bauerlein and Grantham 41). In the years following these reforms, the endowment helped to fund historical novels by Julia Alvarez, Cristina Garcıa, Louise Erdrich, Jeffrey Eugenides, Charles Johnson, Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Alice Walker, among others. For more on these changes to the NEA, see Mark Bauerlein and Ellen Grantham. The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) was created by Joe Karaganis, David McClure, Pete Fein, and Jody Leonard. According to its website, “the OSP currently has a corpus of seven million English-language syllabi from over 80 countries.” While the OSP does not claim to be comprehensive, it provides perhaps the single best resource for scholars of contemporary literature and the contemporary university English department (“Open”). These statistics are based on data gathered from the OSP on 3 June 2019. On 16 July 2019, OSP released “Open Syllabus 2.0,” which includes millions of additional syllabi. That said, these figures may have changed. For an earlier investigation into this phenomenon, see James F. English. See Stephen Best and Aida Levy-Hussen (discussed below) on the historical turn in African American literature in particular. Also in 1991, the editors of the New Criterion described Charles Johnson’s National Book Award for Middle Passage (1990)—only the second win for a black author since Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) four decades earlier— as an example of how “the politics of affirmative action has finally destroyed the integrity” of the award: “Now [that] our major literary prizes have succumbed to the same political pressures[,] . . . ideology has supplanted literary excellence as the basis for these prizes” (“Affirmative-action” 2). See Kelly A. E. Mason and Melanie R. Williams. See Whitehead’s interviews with Suzan Sherman (“Colson Whitehead” 78–79) and Linda Selzer (“New Eclecticism” 395–97). See Liz Mineo and Sabrina Li for Whitehead’s reflections on this and other courses in Harvard’s Department of African American Studies. See also discussion of these issues in 1990–91 Harvard Crimson articles by Steve Brown and Roger G. Kuo. For a reading of Whitehead’s novels under the rubric of historiographic metafiction, see Derek C. Maus. Stephanie Li has recently claimed that the novel is not ultimately “a redemptive history but rather one mired in the demands of the literary marketplace [by] an author uniquely attuned to what audiences are willing to bear” (4). Li’s examination of The Underground Railroad—which includes a fascinating Colson Whitehead’s History of the United States Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/melus/mlaa051/6019947 by McGill University Libraries user on 08 December 2020 analysis of the prefatory letter that accompanied advanced reader copies by Doubleday editor William Thomas (who is white)—concludes: While I am not suggesting that Whitehead turned to slavery to bolster his reputation, the book’s success reflects certain publishing realities. As Thomas’s letter both affirms and anticipates, black artists are celebrated for bringing familiar stories of black suffering to mainstream audiences. They are rewarded for fulfilling the protocols of genre or at least racialized literary expectations. (19–20) 15. To some extent, this echoes Levy-Hussen’s recent claim that the institutionalization of the meta-slave narrative over the last several decades has led to a pervasive affect of “boredom” in the genre. “Decades after the invention of such insurgent art and scholarship,” Levy-Hussen argues, “justice and liberation remain frustratingly deferred. For a growing number of black writers and African Americanist critics,” then, “boredom brings to view a mode of literary and scholarly engagement that confronts us with the limits of [the genre’s] agency—and the limits of our own, as readers, writers, and critics.” In this light, Whitehead’s highly reflexive relationship to the meta-slave narrative in this novel, and the “Living History” set piece at its center, may appear as “bored repetitions,” which “[dramatize] the genre’s tragic ineffectuality, its inability to compel the radical change it desires” (“Boredom”). 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