City Writing In Colson Whitehead’s Zone One

Colson Whitehead(1969 –),one of the significant African-American writers in American literature in the twenty-first century,combines post-apocalyptic elements with science fiction background to create the novel Zone One,which reproduces and reflects the image of New York‘s city space.It expresses Whitehead‘s complex emotions of New York City and his insights of the interaction between New York and New Yorkers.From the perspective of Henri Lefebvre‘s ―Spatial Trialectics‖,this thesis offers a spatial interpretation of New York City in the background of the post-apocalypse in Whitehead‘s Zone One.It finds that Whitehead uses the protagonist Mark Spitz‘s interactive experience in a zombie-infested post-apocalyptic world to display the triple spaces of New York City,namely,the physical space of the post-apocalyptic wasteland,the mental space of the alienated urban beings,and the reviving social space of economic,political and ecological recovery.In general,New York City is an infinite tension space that is full of hope and despair,possibility and uncertainty.Specifically,in the physical space,the post-apocalyptic wilderness landscape of Whitehead is not only a literary response to the events of 9/11,but also reveals the dual attributes represented by the spatial pattern of the grid,the street barricades and skyscrapers.That is to say,the physical space of New York gradually restricts the development of individuals and cities though it once provided the basic conditions for personal development.In the mental space,Whitehead employs the two types of city spiritual remains,survivors and zombies,to reveal their survival anxiety and encountered disaster memories in New York City,especially presents the blacks‘ dilemma of identity and spirit.In the social space,Whitehead investigates the potential future of New York City space from a broad social sense by focusing on the abstract space of hegemony of economy,the political hypocritical government agency,and ecological urban environment besieged by technological rationality and garbage,to warn the dehumanized repeatability in the constructional practice of a reviving social space.To sum up,Zone One shows comprehensive reflections about city space from the eyes of modern people.The space of New York City not only carries New Yorkers‘invisible desire to pursue security and freedom in the post-apocalyptic space,but also presents the dilemma and helplessness of people being alienated in the city space under the background of the late capitalism.Whitehead makes Zone One an essential blueprint for interpreting and predicting the city space‘s future development to provide a reference for realizing the immense promise of a better human poetic habitat.