An Interpretation Of The Underground Railroad In Light Of Foucault’s Theory Of Disciplinary Power

Colson Whitehead is an outstanding contemporary American writer in the 20 th century and a rising star in American literary world,known as “the most brilliant American writer of the time”.He has won many awards since his writing,such as Mac Arthur Genius Award,Guggenheim Award and Whiting Writer’s Award.His work is also included in the second edition of the prestigious Norton’s Selected Works of African American Literature.The Underground Railroad is his sixth novel,which won the National Book Award in 2016 and Pulitzer Prize for Novel in 2017 for its unique narrative strategies and profound social significance.With unpretentious words and restrained brushwork,the author tells the story of Cora,a black slave girl,who used the underground railway network to escape from the slave-holding state in the south and went north to seek freedom before the outbreak of the American Civil War.With rich imagination,the author skillfully combines all kinds of oppression suffered by blacks in different periods and makes up an “underground railroad” which likes a historical exhibition hall,so that every site Cora took on the underground railroad shows readers the oppression and injustice suffered by African Americans under the discourse of slavery power.The famous French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault whose theory focuses on the relationship between power and knowledge.In his first genealogical work Discipline and Punishment,he elaborates that how the means of social control has transformed from the old ways of corporal punishments to the way of disciplining its people.The controlling means in his theory of disciplinary power is exactly correspondent with the control mode suffered by slaves in the novel The Underground Railroad.Thus this thesis intends to interpret The Underground Railroad in light of Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power and explore the discipline punishment of the power held by the white man to the black and discuss the author’s reflection on the original sin of American history.And then this paper reveals the practical significance of the theme of the novel to our perspective of racial problems in American society.