“If you could swing it” – The Neoliberal Transformation of Black Lives in Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (2022)

Abstract

“That an African American family inhabits the White House, an edifice built by slaves in 1795, is a powerful example of the transformation of racial attitudes and realities in the United States,” writes African American Studies scholar and social activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in her book From #BLACKLIVESMATTER to Black Liberation (2014). This statement inhabits two essential points that I would like to explore in depth in my talk. First, the maintenance and reproduction of institutional racism, as done symbolically by endorsing the underlying power structures when living and working from a place that was built through slave-labor. Secondly, the neoliberal influences on “colorblindness” and its role in the creation of a “postracial” society. Taking into account Jean Baudrillard’s theory on the hyperreal, which is “more real than the real, and vanishes into simulation” (Impossible Exchange, 12), I ask the question of how the material reality of institutional racism can be expressed in an age marked by hyperreality. Colson Whitehead’s novel Harlem Shuffle (2022) ¬– which, fittingly to the rest of Whiteheads oeuvre, defies categorization into a specific genre – is a striking example of how this reality can be adequately expressed through the lens of the 1960s, on both the content and the stylistic level. In my talk I explore how Whitehead, through his use of the 1960s as a setting, but also through the interplay of a diversity of genres in his novel, transmits a reality of Black Americans in the present.