What is Discovered in the Postblack Wasteland?
Black Agency and Identity in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37536/reden.2025.7.3063Keywords:
Affect, Race, Affective Identity, Postblack Identity, Colson WhiteheadAbstract
This article explicates the disparate affects displayed by the African American protagonist Mark Spitz within the particular spaces of Colson Whitehead’s 2012 novel Zone One. Why are these affects felt and what effect do these shifting affects have on his agency and identity? The article selects three prominent spaces in Zone One and inspects the affective identities produced in these spaces with an emphasis on how they influence the agency of Mark Spitz. It will be argued that the fluctuations in Mark Spitz’s agency throughout his journey are linked/displayed through his abilities (or lack thereof) to act within specific situations. This action/inaction is fuelled by certain affects brought about by some racialized aspect within the space. Furthermore, this will be linked to Colson Whitehead’s own ideological perspectives as it pertained to African American literature and African American identity at the time of Zone One’s writing.
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge.
Ahmed, Sara. 2014. Willful Subjects. Duke UP.
Baden, Robbie. 2019. “An Interview with Colson Whitehead.” In Conversations with Colson Whitehead, edited by Derek C. Maus, 76-81. University Press of Mississippi.
Bell, Bernard W. 2004. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches. University of Massachusetts Press.
Bose, Maria. 2021. “Distantly Reading Race in the Contemporary 'Postrace' Novel.” Textual Practice 35 (1): 39–55.
Dines, Martin. 2022. The Literature of Suburban Change: Narrating Spatial Complexity in Metropolitan America. Edinburgh University Press.
Dyson, Michael Eric. 2011. “Tour(é)ing Blackness.” In Who's Afraid of Postblackness: What It Means to Be Black Now, xii-xx. Touré, Free Press.
Fain, Kimberly. 2015. Colson Whitehead: The Postracial Voice of Contemporary Literature. Rowman and Littlefield.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time, translated by John Macquarie and Edward Robinson. SCM Press.
Heneks, Grace. 2018. “The American Subplot: Colson Whitehead’s Post-Racial Allegory in Zone One.” Comparatist 42 (October): 60–79.
hooks, bell. 2013. Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice. Routledge
Hurley, Jessica. 2015. “History Is What Bites: Zombies, Race, and the Limits of Biopower in Colson White-head’s Zone One.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 56 (3): 311–33.
Low, Setha. 2017. Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place. Routledge.
Mansfield, Nick. 2000. Subjectivity: Theories of Self from Freud to Haraway. New York University Press.
Maus, Derek C., ed. 2019. Conversations with Colson Whitehead. University Press of Mississippi.
Maus, Derek C. 2019. “Introduction.” In Conversations with Colson Whitehead, edited by Derek C. Maus, ix-xxiii. University Press of Mississippi.
Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press.
Palmer, Tyrone S. 2023. “Affect and Affirmation.” In The Affect Theory Reader 2, edited by Gregory J. Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell, 122-40. Duke University Press.
Rachman, Stanley. 1988. Anxiety. Psychology Press.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, Foote, Kenneth, and Maoz Azaryahu. 2016. Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet. Ohio State University Press.
Ryan, Michael. 2010. Cultural Studies: A Practical Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell.
Spillman, Rob. 2019. “An Interview with Colson Whitehead.” Conversations with Colson Whitehead, ed-ited by Derek C. Maus, 67–75. University Press of Mississippi.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press.
Touré. 2011. Who’s Afraid of Postblackness? What It Means to Be Black Now. Free Press.
Valluvan, Sivamohan. 2016. “What is ‘Post-Race’ and What Does It Reveal about Contemporary Racisms?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39 (13): 2241–51.
Whitehead, Colson. 2012. Zone One. Vintage.
Wilkerson, Isabel. 2010. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. Vintage.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Nicholas Sumares
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
