The Underground Railroad, de Colson Whitehead : metaficção, história e política na discussão pós-moderna

Abstract

The present dissertation presents a reading of Colson Whitehead's novel The Underground Railroad (2017), with emphasis on "metafiction", "history" and "politics" in the postmodern discussion. It presents a biographical review and the critical fortune of the author Colson Whitehead, his motivations in writing, as well as his perceptions about the novel analyzed, based on his talk in an interview (National Public Radio, 2016), in order to relate the subjectivities of text writing with the political exercise of African-American subjects. The tradition of narratives of African-American slaves is resumed, according to the studies of Bernard Bell (1987), Asharaf Rushdy (1999) and Timothy Spaulding (2005), in order to reflect and theorize on the types of narratives observed by these theorists: the slave narratives, the neoslave/neo-slave narratives, and the postmodern slave narratives. Combined with the studies on slave narratives, from the point of view of tradition and literary criticism, it is proposed to articulate the concepts of "imagined community", "in-between" and "present/past", in a discussion guided by the Anderson readings (2008), Bhabha (2013) and Hutcheon (1991). It is proposed to review theoretical assumptions and discussions of the postmodern, in order to situate the reader on, especially, the concept of "historiographic metafiction", and to point out elements observed by Linda Hutcheon (1989, 1991, 2000) in aesthetics of postmodern novels, such as irony, parody and interdiscursivity, in the analysis of Whitehead's novel. Based on the studies of Hutcheon (1991), it is observed how the figure of the "ex-centric" focuses on the postmodern, especially on the historiographical metafiction, form of maximum expression of this movement, according to this researcher, through the concepts of "center/margin" and "history" as a text already textualized by previous writings. The focus on the writing of the Afro-American novel as a possibility for cultural and political affirmation of Afro-descendant subjects in the contemporary is linked to the discussion, based on Gilroy's (2012) thesis. It is possible to conclude that the novel The underground railroad promotes a fertile historical review of slavery on the American continent by merging fact and fiction and making use of artifices in the order of narrative form and content such as parody, irony, interdiscursivity, and intertextuality with the narratives of original Afro-American and postmodern slaves such as Toni Morrison’s, Beloved (1987). In addition, it is observed that the slave narratives, in the literary scope, are still little studied in Brazil, as well as, are very few results of productions found on the author Colson Whitehead and the analyzed novel, in Portuguese language. Therefore, this study reveals itself as a fruitful possibility of inserting the author in our contemporary foreign critique and observing relations between Brazil and the United States in their fictional and academic literary production on the original slave narratives and the postmodern slave narratives.