Of course, the jubilation of Obama’s ascent gave way to a populist revolt of white grievance. Then came the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and the dawn of Black Lives Matter, followed by Trump’s campaign of racial resentment and his eventual election. This was the mood in which a different sort of historical imagination began to grip Black thinkers: Afropessimism, a theory most loudly championed by the critic and theorist Frank Wilderson that held that an unceasing and violent hatred of Blackness would always determine historical events. We were not coasting on Obama’s arc, but stuck in a loop.
Afropessimism filtered down into public thought. In his seminal book, “Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates held that the “plunder of Black life was drilled into this country,” so integral that it functioned as “a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.” What did it say that we had elected a Black president and still found ourselves haunted by racism? How had we wound our way back to where things had begun?
As writers grasped for metaphors to understand the time-slip we seemed to have entered, they were drawn back to a particular subgenre: the neo-slave narrative. In the 1970s and ’80s, writers like Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler and Gayl Jones drew on the history of slavery to tell new stories about contemporary Blackness. The results were sobering but irreverent, historically minded but imaginatively free. These books augmented the slave narrative by adapting ghost stories, satire, speculative fiction and other narrative modes, turning slavery into a vast territory for inquiry and invention. Morrison’s “Beloved,” perhaps the most famous example, used the archive as both inspiration and challenge. The largely forgotten life of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who had killed her baby daughter rather than see her raised in bondage, was her starting point for a story of Black people’s attempts to accept the past and chart new paths for the future.
Writers in the post-Obama era returned to this corpus of literature, trying to build on it. Paul Beatty’s 2015 Man Booker Prize-winning “The Sellout,” for instance, was a madcap satire that clowned white society’s inability to see Black people as more than oppressed subjects. Nevertheless, it unironically presented slavery as a frame for understanding contemporary institutional racism. Beatty’s main character tries to prevent his Black Los Angeles suburb from being wiped off the map with an audacious proposal to bring slavery back, playing on the period’s conventional wisdom that phenomena like residential segregation were mere extensions of slavery’s legacy. Other novels — like Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Coates’s “The Water Dancer” and Robert Jones Jr.’s “The Prophets” — took the same impulse in a more solemn direction. And others, like Kiese Laymon’s “Long Division,” substituted the Jim Crow South for the antebellum South. The traumas of those eras were taken to be original wound from which all subsequent wounds flowed.
With “Underground Railroad,” Whitehead joined the chorus. The book told the story of Cora, a runaway slave who escapes on a literal subterranean railroad. The train is the novel’s spine, shuttling us between different states, each with its own speculative form of white supremacy. One episode is set in the ostensibly safe state of South Carolina, where the government has replaced chattel slavery with a system of noblesse oblige, housing and employing Black people, even providing them with health care. Cora sees a woman fleeing from pursuing men and is reminded of having been sexually assaulted back on the plantation where she once lived. As the woman screams, “My babies, they’re taking away my babies!” the book adopts a tone of cool irony. “The onlookers sighed at the familiar refrain. They had heard it so many times in plantation life, the lament of the mother over her tormented offspring.” The woman’s screams are a harbinger: South Carolina has enacted a sterilization scheme that echoes the forced sterilization of Black women in the 20th (and even 21st) century.