The Jim Crow railroad bildungsroman

In this article I explore the interrelationship between the Jim Crow railroad car and the bildungsroman in early twentieth-century African American fiction. My article pairs James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man with Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter to make the argument that both authors understand anti-Black racism as infrastructural, a circulation system that is maintained through infrastructures such as the railroad. I argue that these novels understand the bildungsroman as a narrative infrastructure that is involved in the twinned projects of nationalist consolidation and anti-Black violence. In taking this line of critique, I position both Johnson and Hughes as anticipating and reorganising much of the contemporary literary theory that has coalesced around critical infrastructure studies, while also providing an account of an understudied aspect of the modern African American novel more generally.