![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The chaotic nature of the abject protagonist and his world are central to the novel’s message: slavery is still with us, and the abject, dehumanized other is required for the smooth running of the nation-state even as the nature of that other forces chaos. Winters’s world, where slavery still exists, is a terrifying extension of Trumpian dehumanization of the other, where the last vestige of humanity is stripped from the Black body. Although the composition and release of the book predate Trump’s ascendance to the US presidency, the cultural moment that permitted Trump’s rise informs Winters’s noir–sf mashup. Alternate history, like all science fiction, uses displacement to create a different world that permits insight into the existing one Underground Airlines comments on the horrific legacy of slavery in the United States and explores the complicity necessary to keep a white supremacist system in place. Winter’s Underground Airlines (2016), a novel by a white man that focuses on the experience of a morally ambiguous Black bounty hunter in a contemporary United States where slavery is enshrined in the Constitution, is an alternate history that focuses on history as entropic-that is, history as a force that tends to disorder and chaos. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |