Rethinking the Past: The Underground Railroad and Beloved as Neo-slave Narratives of Escape, Memory, and Haunting

Abstract

This paper interrogates how the theme of escape, haunting, and the long-term impact of traumatic memory redefine historical memory in The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Beloved by Toni Morrison. Through the use of speculative features, Whitehead’s real underground railroad and Morrison’s depiction of the ghostly haunting in the Black people’s lives in America, both books undermine the conventional representations of slavery and the weight of the past, both historical and psychological. The characters in these novels mirror the struggle of physical escape and the inescapable impact of painful memory and how the trauma of the past still lingers with them in the generations of their descendants. By combining realism with speculative aesthetics, Whitehead and Morrison focus on the spectral influence of the past in the construction of identity, and social memory by reversing the direction of historical narratives. Grounded in trauma theory and Afro-pessimist thought, the paper challenges the readers to reconsider the way the legacy of slavery continues to plague even the contemporary society, inviting them to evaluate these two novels not only as an act of historical reappropriation but also a critique of the shortcomings of the traditional historiography.