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The true nineteenth-century story of the Underground Railroad begins in the South and is spread North by free blacks, escaping southern slaves, and displaced, white, anti-slavery Protestant evangelicals. This study examines the role of free blacks, escaping slaves, and white Protestant evangelicals influenced by tenants of Kentucky’s Second Great Awakening who were inspired, directly or indirectly, to aid in African American community building. The impact of Kentucky’s Great Revival resulted in creation and expansion of systems of escape commonly referred to as the “Underground Railroad” which led to self-emancipation among enslaved African Americans, the establishment of free black settlements in the South, North, within Kentucky borderlands, and the Mid- West, and resulting in the eventual outbreak of a Civil War. An examination of slave narratives, escaping slave ads, the history of American religious societies, as well as examination of denominational doctrines, policies, public views, and actions regarding American slavery confirmed the impact of Kentucky’s 1797 Great Revival on freeing slaves, creating black church congregations, establishment of antislavery churches, and benevolent societies throughout Kentucky and the Mid-West. These newly formed churches and societies spread the gospel of black freedom beyond Kentucky into Western Territories particularly Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. The spread of an evangelical religious message and the violent displacement of white and black antislavery advocates had the unintended consequence of aiding freedom seeking slaves in the formation of independent, black settlements and religious societies, not only in Kentucky but also in the North and West. This work acknowledges the central role Kentucky played in providing two of the three acknowledged and well-documented national Underground Railroad escape corridors which successfully ran through eastern Kentucky’s Appalachian Mountains and within the core of the state’s Western and Central Bluegrass Regions.

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This thesis argues that three models of trauma theory, which include traditional trauma theory, postcolonial trauma theory, and cultural trauma theory, must be joined to fully understand the trauma experienced by African Americans within the novels Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. By implementing these three theories, we can see how each novel’s main character is exploring and learning about African American trauma and better understand how an adjustment of space and time creates the possibility for the implementation of trauma theory. Each novel presents a journey, and it is through this movement through space that each character can serve as a witness to African American trauma. This is done in Morrison’s text by condensing the geographical space of the American north and south into one town, which serves to pluralize African American culture. In Whitehead’s text, American history is removed from its chronological place, which creates a duality that instills Freud’s theory of the uncanny within both the character and the reader. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Speculative realism/historical fantasy are labels coined by Stanford University’s Ramon Saldivar. Saldivar describes this genre as “a way of documenting things that have happened, or could happen” (the realist component), but warping realism into science fiction and fantasy, blending and bending the genres (Dickason). In his 2013 article “The Second Elevation of the Novel: Race, Form and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary Narrative,” Ramon Saldivar brings an interesting perspective to how a new generation of authors have taken this genre and exposed utopia as fraud. He argues that as many writers (often members of minorities) seek to challenge the status quo and explore new territories with their prose, a new genre has been born from the utopian and dystopian schools- the genre he coins “speculative realism.” Implicit in his labelling of a new genre is the assumption that existing genres (created and nurtured by the dominant groups in society) are inadequate vehicles for the sort of work these authors seek to do, and in order to make their unique contributions, they have had to become pioneers in the field. Specifically, these authors have focused on utopian and dystopian worlds and have exposed the ruling class ideology hidden in the resolution. This new genre provides perfect material from which to draw texts that encourage students to grapple with the difficult concepts of how society should be organized, and what means might be required to achieve it. This project was developed with high school pedagogical practice in the forefront, therefore texts are chosen based on genre, grade level/interest, and thematic/ideological content. Within each group, the texts are chosen to highlight the deliberate indoctrination present within the current curriculum, and through comparison demonstrate how substituting speculative realist and historical fantasy for dystopian and historical fiction novels both educates and empowers students. In the dystopian genre, the commonly taught Lord of the Flies by William Golding is compared and contrasted with Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series. To explore novels based on history, The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd is contrasted with the historical fantasy The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

<p>This dissertation identifies four American novels published between 2016 and 2018—Colson Whitehead’s <em>The Underground Railroad</em> (2016), Jesmyn Ward’s <em>Sing, Unburied, Sing</em> (2017), Celeste Ng’s <em>Little Fires Everywhere</em> (2017), and Tommy Orange’s <em>There There</em> (2018)—that deploy a multifocal narrative structure to facilitate readers’ ethical engagement with their content. Specifically, these novels’ narrative structures guide readers through spatial reading, or reading across numerous characters’ perspectives of a shared space instead of with the grain of chronological time. Contextualizing these novels within the nation’s shifting racial beliefs initiated by the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, I argue that, in these novels, multifocalization and the spatial reading it activates dismantle the cognitive schemas and cultural discourses that sustain unjust racial ideologies. Spatial reading engages readers in acts of rereading and contextualization that diverge from the practices of generalization and erasure affiliated with myths of racial progress and the rhetoric of colorblindness, and it accordingly builds readers’ capacity to acknowledge racism as systemic, structural, and multifaceted. By emphasizing how each novel facilitates readers’ racial literacy, this project diverges from and complicates the widespread belief that the humanities contribute to antiracism by building readerly empathy, instead championing how the humanities impart upon readers the tools to analyze and critique systemic racism. </p>

It has always been important to study history. But what we can’t forget is that there’s more than one way of doing so. One of those is literature. In this thesis I will therefore study two contemporary historical novels: The Night Watch by Sarah Waters and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. The aim is to explore how they portray different kinds of historical experiences and how that may relate to questions that are relevant even in a contemporary context. Because both novels have an interestning relationship with time and space, I’m going to use the russian literary theorist Micheal Bachtins concept of the chronotope to explore how time and space operates and relate to eachother. In the end, this thesis also aims to show that literature can be a valuable object to study for those that are intererested in histiography.

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