摘要：This study aims to explore causes of continuation of slavery-like practices in postracial America through the analysis of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016). Contemporary African American novels reverberate with the enigma that despite the election of Barak Obama to the US presidency, a black subject still finds herself in a slave-like status. To explore this paradox, The Underground Railroad is investigated in the light of Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial theorization. An important concept of Fanon’s theory; negrophobia, is explored in the text of the novel by examining the psychological causes of slavery and its effects on the blacks as depicted by Whitehead. Resorting to antebellum south, and connecting past with the present through anachronism provide contemporary Black American writers a chance to contest the notion of postraciality, to revisit the past, and to fill gaps in the historical record. The significance of the study is that it analyzes the racial matrix in the US, thereby contributing to the cause of the wretched of the earth; the marginalized, and the oppressed, by deconstructing psychological melody which is the cause of racism.
