"The Tangled Skein of Connections": Slavery Escape Routes from Individuality to Intersectionality in Biofiction and Speculative Historical Fiction

This article focuses on Colum McCann's biofiction TransAtlantic (2013), which it reads alongside Colson Whitehead's speculative historical fiction The Underground Railroad (2016) in order to bring into sharp focus the kind of cultural, political, and intellectual service African American biofiction can perform. Given that the novels of McCann and Whitehead are set in the past, readers might expect an accurate representation of history or at least an interest in a veridical reconstruction of past mentalities. But I argue that such works are more focused on the future than the past, as the biographical novel conjures up lives lost without making them an emblem of loss only to move past them. In other words, while such stories commemorate the dead, what makes them so valuable is that they contain the promise to change the living. More specifically, by lifting the veil from the mechanisms of oppressive power, works like TransAtlantic and The Underground Railroad vividly expose common structures that were operational during the slave trade in Africa as well as the "starve trade" in Ireland. My main conceptual building block is Ian Baucom's model of two poles of realism ("actuarial" and "melancholy"), which I use and expand to suggest that McCann and Whitehead complicate this polarity and allow the actuarial mode to integrate the reflections of the oppressed, while the melancholy mode is nuanced such that it circumvents the risk of sentimentalism. In TransAtlantic, McCann's Douglass undergoes an epistemological transformation, which enables him to see deeper structures of oppressive power through an implicit intersectional grid instead of a slavery-freedom binary. Douglass's revelation about the broader workings of capital, his "actuarial" Eureka-moment, makes him move away from exclusive concerns about race which dismiss the class issue, while at the same changing the accent from biofiction's potential melancholy realism to a more agential use of melancholic impulses, which introduces additional nuance into Baucom's system. The Underground Railroad imagines an almost symmetrical alteration of history, by which chronology-bending Black figures participate in the speculative game which white people wish to subject them to, and create alternative actuarial models which challenge the white monopoly on speculation. In both cases, the originality of African American approaches and the strength of interracial agency and intersectional thought points towards lines of f