Beyond Black Girlhood

Abstract How can Colson Whitehead’s combining of the generic and the strange in his Pulitzer Prize–winning speculative text The Underground Railroad be read as Afro-Pessimist? This essay seeks to illuminate the ways in which Whitehead’s novel provides narratives of self-making adjacent to coming of age while reinventing the historically white genre of the Bildungsroman for an intersectional identity in early America. Using Geta LeSeur’s The Black Bildungsroman as a point of reference, the author argues that because the protagonist Cora is a Black girl born and raised under chattel slavery and thus forced to come of age before the bulk of the novel, her experience cannot be constrained to a genre defined primarily by Eurocentric traditions and frames of reference. In this way, “girlhood” has never been a possibility for her, making the novel’s ambiguous ending a clearer Afro-Pessimist argument rather than any particular milestone of maturation we see in Bildungsroman. The Underground Railroad is a case study demonstrating how Black speculative fiction authors move through and beyond the Bildungsroman genre by imbuing their Black female subjects like Cora with the agency of self-making, while using speculative elements such as transforming into a railroad to demonstrate the intractable social death of enslavement.