Discipline And Resistance In Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead is a representative of contemporary African American writers.Upon its publication in 2016,his novel,The Underground Railroad,won the National Book Award for Fiction(2016)and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction(2017),for its unique narrative style and profound social themes.This novel is set in the southeastern region of the United States before the Civil War and takes the journey of Cora,a fugitive slave girl,from south to north via a fictional underground railroad,as a clue.It reveals the oppression and exploitation that blacks suffered,and presents the darkness and brutality of American slavery,as well as the blacks’ unyielding resistance to disciplinary power and their pursuit for freedom.Based on Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power,this thesis makes a detailed analysis of the exercise of disciplinary power,the racial oppression the blacks suffered and their resistance to it.First of all,this thesis explores how disciplinary power "makes" slaves.Hierarchical observation places blacks into an uninterrupted and continuous network of visibility and insures the smooth exercise of disciplinary power.Based on their constant observation,the slaveholders employed normalizing judgement to make them adapt to certain norms by corrective penalty or reward.The examination objectified slaves through observation and supervised a larger part of colored population by introducing them into the field of documentation.Second,focusing on the bodies,discourse and knowledge,this thesis reveals the effects of disciplinary power on the blacks.Under the control of disciplinary power,the docility of bodies increases,their discourse was missing and what they treated as truth was actually distorted knowledge produced by the white dominants for the justification of the rightness of slavery.Finally,the partial struggle against disciplinary power was discussed.Some slaves escaped from the tortuous plantation,fought with the dominant whites and observed the latter conversely.By means of study,the colored learned to think and became able to differentiate truth from lies.On the basis of disciplinary power,this thesis explores the social roots of the blacks’ miserable living conditions in The Underground Railroad and the methods of resistance,which enriches and promotes further the researches on this novel.