Afrofuturism in Contemporary African American Literature : Reading Colson Whitehead.

Abstract

In this post-civil rights era, racial relations are highly complex: racism has not disappeared, but a discourse on postracialism has emerged. Colson Whitehead's fiction explores the vertiginous vortex that represents the complexity of the contemporary problematic relationship between blackness, the future, and technology. This paper shows how race is represented in an 'Afrofuturistic' America by highlighting Afrofuturist aspects in Whitehead's The Intuitionist and Zone One, where the representation of race feeds on the postracial discourse. What may be the implications of representing a post-apocalyptic world? Are racial distinctions still relevant in the context of 'critical posthumanism'? Is the future postracial?