Racial Capitalism and the Architecture of Captivity in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

Abstract

This article approaches The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead as a novel that renders slavery as a system of racial capitalism instead of condensing it to singular acts of interpersonal savagery. Through close reading with the concepts of the racial capitalism, carceral geography, and spatial power, the paper defines captivity as a recurring production by using designed settings, mobility checks, administrative practices and institutional discourse in the novel. It takes the plantation as the production architecture, South Carolina as politics of medicalized and exhibition-based governance, North Carolina as domestic and civic erasure, Valentine Farm as a flimsy counter-space and the underground railroad as a precarious counter-infrastructure. Combining these sources, one can observe that Whitehead introduces domination as an organization of space, the evolution of history, and material reproduction. The article thus adds a better literature based explanation of how the novel connects slavery, contemporary institutions and constructed environment.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54633/2333-025-058-004