"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves:" Redefining the Content of Freedom in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad

As the question of race becomes more urgent in the United States, the myth of the Underground Railroad—that network of aid offering a way to freedom to enslaved AfricanAmericans—has been the object of a renewed interest. This system, which operated from the beginning of the 19th century to the start of the Civil War, not only represented a form of rebellion against that climate of racial inequality that affected the South, but also redefined the content of freedom for the black community. Indeed, the question has become even more prominent with the publication of Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed novel, The Underground Railroad (2016). The novel recounts a young black slave's escape across the "Railroad" (in Whitehead’s narrative a realistic railway system) used to escape from slavery throughout the Deep South to reach the free state of Canada. As I intend to show, the railroad as a physical means of transportation, bears a significance that goes way beyond its original usage, becoming the epitome of a freedom rhetoric to emancipate the black community. As such, the novel will be analyzed with the purpose of considering the railroad as a doorway to reconfigure the value of freedom not as an exclusive white privilege but as a means to subvert white suprematism in favour of black empowerment. Analysis will show how the novel proposes a "new" image of liberty fictionalized by Whitehead through the railroad, a physical and concrete train, symbolizing a new black promise to liberty and emancipation. Given this, the aim of the essay is to examine the meaning of freedom in the novel to show how Whitehead, drawing from the slave narrative genre, redefines the importance of freedom as a concept inevitably codified within the idea of race to distinguish and iscriminate black people who were considered non worthy of liberty. As the concept in the United States has always stood beside, and competed with, a general idea of equality, Whitehead proves how the concept of liberty in his “new slave narrative” is concretely linked to dis-equality, and redefines the content of freedom as a form of black suprematism over an oppressing white-centric culture.