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What unites the critical response to Colson Whitehead's 2016 novel The Underground Railroadis universal interest in the text's attitude towards historical truth. I contend that critics fixate so much on the issue of truth that they miss how the novel offers an alternative to historic truth in the form of an aesthetic encounter. During her employment as a “living exhibit” in North Carolina’s Museum of Natural Wonders, protagonist Cora despairs at the apparent absence of truth. Despite the overt manipulation of history to justify white imperialism in the museum, Cora experiences a transcendent moment of refuge when she works the exhibits in reverse order, starting in slavery and ending in Africa. When performing in the Africa exhibit, Cora experiences an unusual sensation of calm and refuge. This moment occurs despite the gross inaccuracies of the museums designed to reinforce white imperial ideology. Cora’s experience suggests that the novel cares more about the aesthetic experience of history rather than its material realities.
I argue that Cora’s “genuine refuge” serves as a blueprint for the whole novel. Looking at Whitehead’s novel as strictly satirical ignores its moving depictions of growth and determination while conversely treating it as a simple vehicle for “truth” overlooks Whitehead’s unraveling of institutional forms of history-making through what I call the novel’s exhibitive structure. This exhibitive structure allows Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad to occupy a middle space between “speculative satire” and what I call “speculative immediacy.” We can see how Whitehead critiques institutional history while also offering an alternative as we trace how the novel employs a musealized form. Underground Railroadrepresents the encounter with history through Cora's pursuit of freedom where her brief moments of refuge are found in the aesthetics of a community.
In conversation with Zadie Smith’s approach to attunement, I show how the text argues for the importance of “useful delusions” that communities can use to construct their histories in empowering networks that can be mobilized for the renegotiating of identity, agency, and personhood. “Historical attunement” opens future research into how art translates to conceptual innovation, personal transformation, and political action. The “truth of our historic encounter” in Whitehead’s novel is embedded in aesthetic practices of determination, hope, and belonging that offer a genuine refuge amidst so many states of possibility.