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

This article analyzes 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 that biofiction by or about African Americans can perform. By lifting the veil from the mechanisms of oppressive power, these two novels 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 expand to suggest that McCann and Whitehead complicate this polarity, allowing the actuarial mode to integrate liberation strategies for the oppressed and nuancing the melancholy mode to circumvent the risk of sentimentalism. In both cases, the strength of interracial agency and intersectional thought points toward lines of flight from the actuarial-melancholic binary.