In Henry Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974/1991) he identifies three types of space: conceived space, the spaces of cartographers or city planners; perceived space, the space of everyday social life that is often ignored by the more theoretical conceived space; and lived space, the space of the human citizen with an active imagination. For Lefebvre, an existentialist and neo-Marxist, space is inextricably bound to power hierarchies. As Lieven Ameel summarises: ‘In Lefebvre’s view, space is not something that simply “is”, either absolute or a priori. Space, on the contrary, is always experienced and perceived, always dependent on a subject and thus, on a body’ (Ameel 2016, 24). Colson Whitehead’s fiction offers a similar focus on the lived experience associated with certain spaces. For Whitehead, time and racial identity form crucial components in the construction of literary ‘lived’ spaces. His fiction connects, in a way, the perceived space and the lived space that Lefebvre explores. The literary city—as the type of space Whitehead most frequently writes about—is therefore always both in and out of time; it is a recognisable image of both the past—and a deliberately distorted reflection of it—and the future. This is true of both the versions of New York that Whitehead creates in the uncanny space of Manhattan in The Intuitionist (1999) where racial integration is a relatively new concept; and the Manhattan of Zone One (2011) which has been devastated by the outbreak of a deadly zombie virus. In his work on literary versions of Helsinki, Ameel notes that ‘There is indeed something profoundly reductionist in equating the literary city with its geographically locatable counterpart’ (2016, 14). Yet, it is this locatability that makes the speculative city so effective. Whitehead’s writing of the urban space—its history, its architecture, its rhythms, its spatial dynamics—are all intrinsically connected to debates about racial politics, time, and ‘safe’ spaces in contemporary America.
This chapter will explore the intersections between a hegemonic history of America and how Whitehead’s writing functions as a way of destabilising concepts of history by narrating the experiences of history from multiple different perspectives. I am interested in how this can be traced through and inscribed on the urban spaces of New York and the way in which Whitehead explores how the lack of safe spaces for African Americans in America usually correlates to a lack of safe time for African Americans in American history. I will consider the representation of this relationship between the city, time, and African American citizens in three of Colson Whitehead’s novels, The Intuitionist , Zone One , and The Underground Railroad (2016). In the first two texts, Whitehead uses a speculative version of New York to suggest that space and place operate in a multi-folded version of time and history within his imaginative reconstructions of New York. In The Underground Railroad , Whitehead develops this approach through his neo-slave narrative where real-life spaces are again repurposed and rewritten. For Whitehead, time is often explored as history, and his fiction suggests this sense of ‘history’ needs to be thoroughly examined from multiple perspectives before time and the promise of the future can ever progress in a positive and inclusive manner.
Jason Finch’s work on deep locational criticism offers a way of approaching studies of literature and place. Finch argues that his method takes ‘account of both the text-internal and referential dimensions of place (or, to put the same thing another way, the imaginary and real)’ (2016, 2). For writers attempting an imagined, speculative or revised version of a real city, another layer of complication is added, as they are not just attempting to write the city but to write a different version of the city, one different in time but not in geographical place. The speculative literary city must therefore always be uncanny, strange enough to be new, yet familiar enough to be recognisable. Both The Intuitionist and Zone One reconceptualise New York as a ‘new’ version of the actual, real city, and Whitehead rebuilds literary urban spaces and repurposes each as a place for social criticism. In doing so, Whitehead clearly draws on a long tradition of writing and rewriting the city. What sets Whitehead’s work apart from other literary treatments of New York is his fierce focus on contemporary American politics and racial inequalities. Whitehead’s construction of alternative and speculative cities serves to illustrate the lack of safe spaces for the African American community ; they are simultaneously a direct response to the traumatic history of African Americans in civic spaces. For example, his characters frequently find the city to be a dangerous space where their racial identity renders them profoundly vulnerable. This traumatic history is both historical and recent, stretching from the Antebellum America, the segregated Jim Crow South, through to the Civil Rights marches, the LAPD riots of the 1990s, and the Black Lives Matter movement of the twenty-first century. For Whitehead, the passing of time therefore rarely signifies any form of positive progression.
The ongoing complexities of African American identity and history are at the centre of all of Whitehead’s fiction, and when re-imagining the city, Whitehead is acutely aware that public civic spaces have a problematic history for African Americans. Whitehead explores literary representations of the city that draw out this issue of how civic safety can be dependent upon skin colour. What might be considered a benign space for a white American can be a place for terror for a person of colour. Claudia Rankine, in her award-winning prose poem Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) draws attention to this by documenting a series of racial micro-aggressions and harassments that happen to the speaker in public spaces—on an aeroplane, in a campus cafeteria, in Starbucks, in a shop, on the subway. These microaggressions, suddenly frozen and removed from the quotidian, become moments that reveal the vulnerability created by the hypervisibility of African-Americans in public spaces increasingly policed by aggressive white privilege. In Between the World and Me (2015), Ta-Nehisi Coates writes a letter to his teenage son as a means of explaining how institutions such as school and the police effectively disempower African Americans, and details how growing up in 1980s Baltimore he was acutely aware that his race and gender made him both visible and vulnerable. Recent protests in Charlottesville have highlighted how many African Americans must critically navigate public spaces where slavery is commemorated, where roads are named after Confederate generals and slave-owners, and the Confederate flag is displayed as a nostalgic and unproblematic way of remembering the past.
Alternative New York: Verticality and Notoriety
As actual, real, lived American city spaces often have an unacknowledged history of violence for African Americans, speculative spaces in art and fiction become increasingly important. Ramon Saldavar’s theoretical approach to reading and analysing speculative work by writers of colour focuses on the development of a ‘postrace aesthetic’ involving ‘speculative realism’. Saldavar defines speculative realism ‘as a way of getting at the revisions of realism and fantasy into speculative forms that are seeming to shape the invention of new narrative modes in contemporary fiction’ (2013, 3). For Saldavar, speculative realism operates alongside genre splicing, postmodern writing techniques, and racial politics to function as a theoretical approach—postrace aesthetics—for writers of colour who write speculative fiction. Speculative city spaces can therefore become a way of allowing writers to consider alternative histories, potential futures, and imaginative possibilities. The term ‘postrace’ is used, as Saldavar notes, ‘with full ironic force’ (2013, 2) in a contemporary America where white supremacy is ‘the unacknowledged ideology of our times’ (2013, 2). Imagining a speculative version of New York that still has enough recognisable elements to remind the reader of the real-life geographical location thus becomes a specific way of engaging with racial politics. Speculative spaces in literature are pedagogical spaces for Whitehead, created to signal that America still has a very long way to go when it comes to reflecting on its institutional practices with regard to race and space. Whitehead’s imaginative cities are always fantastical, satirical spaces that feature some clear hallmarks of Afrofuturism, such as alienation, representations of the lived realities of black bodies in the past and present, and a re-examination of the historical past to attempt to build new truths outside of the dominant cultural narrative.
Whitehead’s first novel, The Intuitionist , established some of the central themes and ideas that he continues to explore in his later writing. Set in an unnamed city full of skyscrapers and impossibly high buildings that is clearly meant to be New York but is deliberately never confirmed as such, concepts of time are intrinsically connected with Whitehead’s construction of African American life in the city. Lila Mae Watson is the city’s first black female Elevator Inspector, working in a profession that has, the narrator’s voice wryly informs the reader, an ‘undeniable macho cachet’ (Whitehead 1999, 21). In this deliberately Gotham-esque vertical city, elevator inspecting is a serious business and one which necessitates years of study. By using the metaphor of the elevator, Whitehead plays with ideas of verticality and ascension, drawing on a long tradition of African-American writing which stretches back to the work of writers such as W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, who explore migration, urban movement, and ideologies of racial uplift. For Lila Mae, working as an Intuitionist is the literal and metaphorical means of elevating herself within her present society. In the world of The Intuitionist , the Department of Elevator Inspectors is divided into two camps, for in this alternative world, there are two binary approaches to the inspection of elevators. The Intuitionists possess the ability to feel or ‘intuit’ any elevator. In contrast, the Empiricists use traditional instruments to assess an elevator and are deeply suspicious of Intuitionist methodology. Lila Mae, an Intuitionist and proud of it, has the highest accuracy rate in her department.
A single moment in time changes Lila Mae’s life forever and forces her to re-evaluate her relationship with the city, with history, and with her role in urban life in general. When an elevator that Lila Mae has recently inspected crashes, her professional reputation is called into question, as is the whole Intuitionist school of theory. The trauma of the crashed elevator effectively disrupts Lila Mae’s experience of linear time. She is convinced the elevator was sabotaged and begins her investigation into the darkest corners of the city, uncovering bit by bit the murky secrets of the Elevator Guild. Lila Mae spends much of the text searching for the mysterious ‘black box’ that contains the notes of the now deceased James Fulton, credited as the architect of the Empiricist school. Halfway through the novel, Fulton is revealed to have been an African American who successfully passed for white. His black box, containing the engineering blue print for a revolutionary new type of elevator, is conceptualised as a Pandora’s box that holds the key to the mystery, and one that will, Lila Mae reflects, ‘deliver us from the cities that we suffer now’ (Whitehead 1999, 61), suddenly takes on new meaning. As Madhu Dubey notes, African Americans are revealed to be the ‘hidden architects of modern cities’ (2003, 238). Whitehead aims to remind the reader of the history of African American labour that has so often been eradicated from historical narratives, yet is absolutely intrinsic in literally building the spaces from which African Americans are subsequently disenfranchised. Lila Mae, an intersectional figure who is never allowed to forget her heritage, now possesses incontrovertible proof that an African American was responsible for the design of her city. The current urban landscape is thus ideologically transformed by Lila Mae’s new knowledge of the ‘true’ historical past. Lila Mae is now aware that there is a competing version of the ‘history’ that has shaped her present, and hegemonic history can be rewritten through the literal construction of new monuments. As Saundra Liggins argues, ‘With this black box, Whitehead has created an ingenious metaphor for racial uplift. The investigation into the validity and location of the plans for the black box functions effectively as an exploration into the past, present, and future of racial progress, outlining the compromises, losses, and gains inherent in such an evolution’ (2006, 365). Lila Mae cannot unlearn what she knows, of course, and her entire understanding of history—and her possible future—has been irrevocably altered.
Through the elevator metaphor, and the revelation of Fulton’s real identity, Whitehead offers a re-examination of the role of African Americans in urban history, and American history more generally. As Ruth Mayer has stated about the United States, ‘black history is both there and not there, evident in countless traces, scars, and memories, yet largely submerged when it comes to written accounts and first-person documentations of the past from the viewpoint of the victims’ (2000, 558). In his fiction, Whitehead makes explicit what some versions of American history have tried to eradicate. The ‘traces, scars, and memories’ to which Meyer refers, the traumatic relationship between African Americans, time, and space, a history that has been chronicled on the body through scars and beatings, and on city spaces through racial segregation of civic areas, is the history that Whitehead is trying to expose and interrogate. Whitehead’s writing shows how African Americans can be haunted by a cultural memory of a traumatised past. In this reading, time and history can be an immense burden on the individual, as Lila Mae’s reaction to Fulton’s secret suggests: she must now carry on his work. Whitehead’s fiction can therefore be read as a process of imaginative restoration, a reclaiming of African American spaces in alternative versions of landmark American cities. Lila Mae has the chance to change history, to write a new future that acknowledges African American intellect, ingenuity, and labour. The verticality to which she is now even more attuned—with the revelation of Fulton’s true identity—is about racial uplift, about making visible what has been previously rendered invisible. Lauren Berlant reads the Fulton reveal as integral to the racial politics of the text, and the narrative structure of the novel: ‘This detective plot reveals slowly a secretly racialized map of twentieth-century utopian technologies’ (2008, 8). These new designs for the cities of the future, Lila Mae realises, offer not just a new form of elevator, or even a new form of city life, but the creation of a new order, a brand-new civic space. The promise of a new version of future time offers Lila Mae hope. She perceives it as tabula rasa, a chance to start again and rewrite public space for a new and more inclusive world.
This new knowledge places Lila Mae at the intersection of two versions of time. She must understand the past (time-as-history) in order to write the future (time-as-possibility). She is at the juncture of the old and the new; she has the power to change things for the better. The New York of The Intuitionist therefore exists both in and out of the fictional timeline constructed in the text. Whitehead draws on the quasi-mythical status of New York (and especially Harlem) as a ‘safe space’ in the North during America’s Jim Crow years. Liggins notes that ‘the northern city in particular has been the source of much inspiration in African American literature, codifying ideas of both hope and frustration’ (2006, 360). The frustration Liggins refers to is the assumption that safety lies northward when in fact this was not always the case, and Whitehead plays with this historical assumption throughout The Intuitionist . Lila Mae, who has migrated from the South to New York, has also presumed a greater safety to be found in the metropolis, only to learn that city life is far more complicated than she imagined. Fulton’s new possibilities for a different future are therefore imbued with a certain urgency which Lila Mae—marginalised through both race and gender—is quick to recognise.
Lila Mae’s pseudo-Biblical imagining of the second elevation, the new world order she believes will be necessitated by the delivery of Fulton’s elusive black box, is a terrifying vision of the future delivered from a problematic present. Her vision is one of apocalypse where the new New York as the ‘shining city’ seems to suggest an end to time and history itself; a literal unveiling of a new order. This fresh understanding of architecture, space, and verticality will mean that New York will have to be destroyed and built again. Even as Lila Mae contemplates this imaginary future for her city, she is aware of the tensions between capitalism and environmental justice, as the rubble and debris from the decimated city of the future will have to be sent to ‘less popular boroughs’. Perhaps Queens and the Bronx might have to suffer so that this ‘new’ Manhattan will be able to shine. In Lila Mae’s imagination, the city is sentient, a living organism of a metropolis with ‘untold arms and a thousand eyes’, watching its inhabitants. It is ‘mutability itself’, able to remould and rebuild itself at a whim. The role of the human architect at this point is unclear (it is possible, of course, that it might be Lila Mae herself); she can only see the possibilities of this new space, which will be ‘constructed of yet-unconjured plastics’. The pacing and rhythm of this section reveal the rapidity of Lila Mae’s thought process as she dreams of this possible future, this speculative city: ‘It will float, fly, fall, have no need of steel armature, have a liquid spine, no spine at all’. The city is full of movement, flexibility, and possibility. Even at this moment of imagining a future moment in time, Lila Mae is caught in the past, conceiving as this new city as ‘heliopolis’, the ancient city of the sun; in this moment that folds together time, myth and history she can imagine the apocalyptic future of New York. The ‘Astronomer-architects’ take on God-like powers. Lila Mae’s relationship with time structures this passage as she spins her urban fantasy of the future by focusing on the destruction of her present.They will have to raze the city and cart off the rubble to less popular boroughs and start anew. What will it look like. The shining city will possess untold arms and a thousand eyes, mutability itself, constructed of yet-unconjured plastics. It will float, fly, fall, have no need of steel armature, have a liquid spine, no spine at all. Astronomer-architects will lay out the Heliopolis so that it charts the progress of the stars through heaven. (Whitehead 1999, 198–99)
This dream of infinite and beautiful city spaces operates in sharp contrast to Lila Mae’s experience of urban life up to this point. When training at the Institute for Vertical Transport, Lila Mae lived in the janitor’s closet because there was no living space for African American students. She is literally kept out of sight, hidden away from the rest of the community. As Dubey points out in her study Signs and Cities , Whitehead ‘participates in a postmodern interrogation of the grand narrative of urban modernization, showing that this narrative gains coherence through racial exclusion’ (2003, 238). Fulton’s passing for white, the most successful form of racial exclusion (and one that Fulton willingly participated in) is symptomatic of a culture where whiteness is continuously privileged. At one point in the novel, suspecting her Empiricist colleagues of sabotaging her career and investigation, Lila Mae chooses to follow them to the Elevator Guild’s most important night of the year, the wonderfully named ‘Annual Funicular Follies’ (Whitehead 1999, 147). Barred from entering as herself, a professional woman, Lila Mae dresses as a maid and spends the evening waiting tables, serving her colleagues, and listening to the secrets of the Guild. Nobody recognises her; she is simply another nameless African American woman serving food and drink to white men: ‘She understood that this night was for all the Department but her’ (Whitehead 1999, 153). Whitehead’s point here is not that Lila Mae is passing at this stage (or any stage) of the novel; it is simply that her race and gender renders her painfully invisible in the urban environment: ‘In here they do not see her. She is the colored help’ (Whitehead 1999, 153). During the Follies, she witnesses two of her co-workers putting on blackface and performing a minstrel show, and a performance from ‘the Safety Girls’, a group of twenty white women singing and dancing whilst wearing ‘short and tight crimson outfits’ (Whitehead 1999, 150). The Follies are revealed to be a horrific celebration of racism, misogyny, and masculine ego that Lila Mae is forced to witness. As Ameel suggests during his study of literary Helsinki, ‘The most important research subject in the present study is not so much the city itself, or even images of the city, but the experience of the city in literary texts’ (2016, 15). Lila Mae’s experience of city life in this moment—that it is exclusionary, misogynist, and ignorant—is what drives the narrative.
Lila Mae’s role in the text is to forge potential new spaces for other African Americans. She must fight to find a space—a safe space—away from the confines of the janitor’s closet from which she has emerged. Saldavar reads The Intuitionist as a history of the future (2013, 4). As the text ends, Lila Mae is the custodian of Fulton’s work; she will continue his legacy as African Americans are revealed to be the true architects of the modern city. In doing this, it is implied, she will become as visible as the vertical architecture to which she has dedicated her life.
City of the Future: Manhattan in Ruins
Over a decade after the success of The Intuitionist, Whitehead published Zone One (2011), a fresh take on the zombie novel. In an America virtually destroyed by a zombie virus, Mark Spitz and his fellow volunteer soldiers must clear out and make safe ‘Zone One’, the space that once used to be downtown Manhattan. Spitz’s relationship with time and the city structures the text as the action takes place over three days of the clean-up operation. The novel is focalised through Spitz and his memories of the glorious New York of his past, contrasted with the terrifying reality of the Zone One of his present. The very first line of the novel establishes the arch tone of the narrative voice, with the admission that Spitz ‘had always wanted to live in New York’ (Whitehead 2011, 3). The zombie apocalypse has suddenly made that dream of city living come true. As the novel begins, the new American government—now based in Buffalo—has decreed that the time has come to reclaim Manhattan, and the skyscrapers and office blocks of Zone One must be cleared of any remaining zombies so that this premium urban space can be re-used as accommodation for top government officials. Whitehead’s construction of New York in Zone One, just as in The Intuitionist , is as a deliberately uncanny landscape. It is a ruined space where the volunteer soldiers such as Spitz survive on army rations provided through corporate sponsorship of the clean-up operation. Capitalism must play its role, even after the zombie apocalypse, and one of the first things to be restored after the zombie outbreak is, of course, corporate paperwork. Spitz’s relationship with the New York he clearly remembers visiting as a child, and the disturbing Zone One of his present, provides a literary re-mapping of the city space and is used by Whitehead to allow the reader to learn the ‘new’ New York that he has created.
This is complicated when it is revealed—almost at the very end of the novel—that Spitz is actually African American. ‘Mark Spitz’ is not even the protagonist’s real name (which is never revealed) but is instead a nickname. Moreover, it is a nickname that was awarded because of a racist joke when Spitz’s fellow white survivors were surprised that he, as a black man, could swim. Mark Spitz is a white American Olympic swimmer, so the use of this nickname can be read, as Jessica Hurley suggests, as transforming the text into a ‘meta-passing novel’ (2015, 321). Just as with the revelation of Fulton’s race in The Intuitionist , cleverly hinted at with his creation of the ‘black box’, Spitz’s status as an African American recalibrates some of the text’s politics. Spitz’s walking of Zone One and role as a flâneur is suddenly far more complex as he is an African American abroad on dangerous city streets. He is potentially in even more danger than his fellow (white) volunteer soldiers. The existence of his nickname and the text’s withholding of his real name serves to reiterate Whitehead’s point that racism seems to have survived the zombie apocalypse just fine. Saldavar argues that: ‘As an aesthetic mechanism of fear management, the representation of apocalypse thus becomes for Whitehead a way of containing and processing a world too close to our own for full comfort in hope. In the end, Whitehead proposes that it may well be necessary first to imagine the end of the world before we may imagine the historical end of racialization and racism’ (2013, 13). Speculative realism therefore becomes a mode in which the writer of colour can offer hope to their readership through the imagining of a new civic space.
Spitz recognises that Zone One is simply the latest incarnation of Manhattan. The city has always been a work in progress, a flexible and transformative space to be updated whenever necessary in order to serve the citizens. The verticality of the city is emphasised alongside the old competitions for architectural height and status. Configured as works of art, the ‘old masters’ of old New York are eventually ‘butchered, reconfigured, rewired’. Despite this, the ‘addresses remained the same’. Just as Lila Mae’s vision of the future is quasi-apocalyptic, Spitz’s reflection on the spaces of New York also seems to suggest that Whitehead does not subscribe to the idea of wholly positive progression. Architects become ‘midwives’, helping the city to give birth to a new (not always improved) version of itself. Time is a transforming agency but the physical spaces—the addresses—serve as a cultural and geographical anchor to the past. This is the New York that Spitz remembers from his childhood, and ‘[t]he boy was smitten’ (Whitehead 2011, 6). It is a version of this city that he is trying to save through the attempted regentrification of Zone One. As Spitz works his way through the city—visiting restaurants he used to frequent, offices he once worked in, shops he used to visit—Whitehead offers a novel written as a pseudo-memoir of Spitz’s former life, and time-as-memory is layered and complex, lying upon the cultural remnants of the New York that everyone knows. A memorial to the New York of the reader’s present that has been re-imagined as the lost past of the novel. As ever, in post-apocalyptic fiction, remembering what has gone before is painful but necessary for the narrative. Former restaurants and cafes are now used as briefing areas for the army; Spitz and his team camp in old offices and abandoned spaces as architecture is recycled out of necessity in the new urban landscape. A flâneur in a new and unstable world, Spitz walks and walks and walks around former Manhattan. The necessary relearning of a once-familiar environment is, of course, a standard trope of post-apocalyptic writing and associated media. On television and in film, the same strategy of uncanny environment is also used—The Walking Dead and Atlanta, the London of 28 Days Later (2002)—to understand what Whitehead is trying to accomplish through writing Spitz’s navigation of the once well-known landscape.He remembered how things used to be, the customs of the skyline. Up and down the island the buildings collided, they humiliated runts through verticality and ambition, sulked in one another’s shadows. […] Yesterday’s old masters, stately named and midwifed by once-famous architects, were insulted by the soot of combustion engines and by technological advances in construction. Time chiseled at elegant stonework, which swirled or plummeted to the sidewalk in dust and chips and chunks. Behind the facades their insides were butchered, reconfigured, rewired according to the next era’s new theories of utility. Classic six into studio honeycomb, sweatshop killing floor into cordoned cubicle mill. In every neighborhood the imperfect in their fashion awaited the wrecking ball and their bones were melted down to help their replacements surpass them, steel into steel. The new buildings in wave upon wave drew themselves out of rubble, shaking off the past like immigrants. The addresses remained the same and so did the flawed philosophies. It wasn’t anyplace else. It was New York City. (Whitehead 2011, 5–6)
The city has become an unknowable space. Monotone and blurred, the visual landscape no longer has any defining features or place for the ‘elegant stonework’ (2011, 6) at which Spitz used to marvel. The ‘old masters’ are now indecipherable from the landscape and Spitz is aware of his own tiny place in the new world order. Whitehead draws on the imaginative past of Spitz’s memories whilst offering an unsettling vision of the city’s future that can seem all too recognisable.Was he looking north or south? It was like dragging a fork through gruel. The ash smeared the city’s palette into a gray hush on the best of days, but introduce clouds and a little bit of precip and the city became an altar to obscurity. He was an insect exploring a gravestone: the words and names were crevasses to get lost in, looking and meaningless. (Whitehead 2011, 8)
How New Yorkers spent their time in relation to the urban environment is also a crucial part of Whitehead’s construction of Zone One. This is done predominantly through the way that Whitehead rewrites the figure of the zombie. Building on the work of Donna Haraway’s figure of the cyborg, Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry argue that ‘the zombie now represents the new slave, the capitalist worker, but also the consumer, trapped within the ideological construct that assures the survival of the system’ (2008, 99). Whitehead reinforces this interface of consumer and capitalist ideologies in the construction of the ‘straggler’ zombies. Unlike the familiar figures of the mindless zombie horde—called ‘skels’ by Spitz and his companions—the ‘stragglers’ are rarely violent, and instead are caught in a time loop of repetition. They repeat the actions of their former life again and again and again, usually in their place of work. Time has become a trap for the stragglers; their experience of the city is based on their previous life, and they have now become mindless slaves to their personal histories. Hurley reads the formation of the zombie figure within the text as a physical haunting from a time before, as: ‘un-dead: a walking embodiment of past populations that will not stay dead but extrude threateningly into the present, where systems of government disintegrate in the face of an unruly, unrulable population of the no-longer human’ (2015, 312).
Spitz and his comrades function as parallels to the zombies; they are also caught in a capitalist web of exploitative work (clearing out Zone One) rewarded by meagre payment (small rations of food). Just as in the television show of the same name, Spitz understands that although he is living, he is now also part of the ‘walking dead’. Time stands still in the spaces of Zone One; Spitz works his way through former office blocks noticing the evidence of life before—the lunch boxes and coffee mugs on desk—that operate as a bizarre monument to a past that seemingly cannot be recaptured. The focus on corporate space suggests that perhaps one version of time has been suspended; a Foucauldian version of time dependent on understandings of space, power, and knowledge. This understanding of time—corporate, capitalist time where lawyers bill their time by the minute and workers are expected to clock in and out of their low-wage jobs—has now been almost entirely unwritten by the zombie apocalypse. Offices are now mausoleums, and it is only the entrance of Spitz’s team that breaks the stasis of these spaces: ‘He was the first live human being the dead had seen since the start, and the former ladies of HR were starving’ (Whitehead 2011, 14). Whitehead demonstrates, however, that in the space of Zone One, the stragglers are still caught in the patterns of urban modernity. There is no escape from capitalist constructs of work and labour, as the corporate zombies and Spitz’s job attest. Spitz’s narrative, the only narrative of this ‘new’ New York to which the reader has access, is rewriting the narrative of time in the city. Still Foucauldian in nature, but now based more on heightened surveillance (which is what allows for some measure of personal safety).
Unsafe Spaces
Finally, it is useful to consider Whitehead’s most recent and most successful work to date as a way of concluding this chapter. Since publication in 2016, The Underground Railroad has won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Fiction, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, which is awarded annually for the best science-fiction novel of the year. The Underground Railroad , a neo-slave narrative that re-imagines the underground railroad of abolitionist safe houses as an actual train, complete with carriages and stations, has been commercially successful as well critically lauded, and was famously part of Barack Obama’s summer reading list in 2016. Interpreting the text as a work of science-fiction prompts an examination of how race and genre intersect more broadly in Whitehead’s work. Building on the work of established African American science-fiction writers such as Octavia Butler’s whose Kindred (1979) explored a black female traveller being thrown back in time to when her ancestors were enslaved, thus endangering her very existence in the present day of the novel, also plays with ideas of time and space. For both Butler and Whitehead, time is integral in understanding some of the complexities of African American identity, a cultural identity that was itself forged from a violent historical past. Being black is about thinking about how one can reflect on the past in order to make a better present and is a concept that Whitehead and Butler both reflect on. A nuanced understanding of time can therefore create concepts of race—as happens in terms of the literary representation of slavery in Whitehead’s work—but can also fix or develop troubling concepts of race (and racism) as The Underground Railroad seeks to do.
In The Underground Railroad , cities and time play a complex role. The enslaved Cora, running away from the horrors of plantation life, finds herself travelling from Georgia through to South and then North Carolina and finally Indiana. The traditional literary motif of space and time that suggests that journeying North is a move towards a better future and new possibilities is one that has always played a central role in African American life (from escaping from the antebellum South to the Great Migration of the early twentieth century) and African American literature, where images of ascent and uplift have a particular resonance (such as in The Intuitionist) . The usual motif of journeying North symbolising progress is directly challenged by Cora’s experiences in The Underground Railroad . The text draws on real-life slave narratives; for example, Cora ends up hiding in an attic for several months in South Carolina, in an obvious reference to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Each of the states has a symbolic significance, and there is more than a hint of steampunk in terms of how urban spaces are imaginatively redesigned in the text. In his world-building, Whitehead excels at a superb blend of speculative fiction and realism that layers historical fact with real geographical spaces and flights of imaginative fancy. South Carolina, for instance, has towering skyscrapers. Entrances to the railroad are carefully hidden and must be accessed through trap doors in safe houses. Suddenly, parts of America are connected by this labyrinthine network of underground tracks. It turns the text into a picaresque, a travel narrative of Cora’s flight towards freedom and safe spaces. But there are multiple horrors along the way. In North Carolina, African Americans (and any whites who help them) are lynched as part of the ‘Freedom Trail’ as Boston’s famous historical sites are repurposed for mass murder. Just as real locations in the United States often have a layered history for African Americans, Whitehead layers his historical narrative, folding multiple levels of fact and fiction to complicate and destabilise the hegemonic concept of ‘history’. Just as New York functions in The Intuitionist and Zone One, North Caroline is thus rendered as an uncanny and complicated space. There are no safe spaces for African Americans in North Carolina; this is Whitehead’s point. The polar opposite of Lila Mae, who dreams of public recognition for her work, Cora longs for invisibility, to be able to move around the city freely as an African American woman. For Cora, being visible in the city is to risk torture, imprisonment, and death. Just like Zone One, The Underground Railroad plays with the idea of safe spaces—characters repeatedly presume a safe is space before this is assumption is cruelly and often violently destroyed.
Whitehead constructs the relationship between time, the city, and the individual as integral to constructions of race and selfhood. In doing this, he offers an explicit parallel to contemporary America. Cora’s terror of being seen on the city streets in The Underground Railroad uncomfortably resonates with recent cases of the violent death of many African Americans on city streets (Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tanisha Anderson). How can the city ever be a safe space for African Americans? In both The Intuitionist and Zone One, New York is repurposed as part of a much bigger political project. The ambiguity of New York itself, and its ability to shape and reshape itself, is part of its attraction for both writer and tourist. The spaces that Whitehead’s characters encounter—empty buildings, janitor’s closets, broken elevators—are all utilised to explore how physical and architectural environments have been politicised. Whitehead’s rewrite of New York serves as a reminder that racial identity can re-map the city for its citizens, and how the historical past must be re-examined for the future to succeed.
As a way of attempting to offer a counter narrative to this version of American history, Bryan Stephenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, has led one of the foundation’s recent projects to mark the sites of historical lynchings as a way of both reclaiming and memorialising public space. Just like Whitehead, Stephenson is attempting to acknowledge the difficult layers of history connected to a specific space. Through his fiction, Whitehead embarks on a similar project, where the understanding that urban spaces are also sites of historical (and more recent) racial atrocities is crucial when considering how space functions within the literary past and present. In this way, city spaces are inevitably bound up in concepts of time as they are continually haunted by memories and physical remnants of the traumatic past.