Nicholas Sumares
ABSTRACT
Post-2016, African American cultural trauma and memory have had a huge influence on Colson Whitehead’s work. The weight of these ideas began in The Underground Railroad in 2016, but they are most explicit in his 2019 novel The Nickel Boys. This article interprets Whitehead’s 2019 novel via a combination of Ron Eyerman’s African American cultural trauma and memory theories, Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s “Racial Formation” theories, and Critical Race Theory, linking them to African American affective subjectivities. Of particular interest is the hope created, lost, and felt within the timespaces occupied by the novel’s two protagonists. By engaging with Setha Low’s formulations of the social production and construction of space, Brian Massumi’s notions regarding affective transition, and Sara Ahmed’s theories on hope, this article will argue that The Nickel Boys ultimately demonstrates that through the processing of shared cultural trauma and memory, African Americans can achieve “hope for a future fulfilled.”
KEYWORDS: Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys, Cultural Trauma, Memory, African American Affective
Nicholas Sumares, part-time assistant professor, Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University and Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, Tunghai University, Taiwan (nicksumares@gmail.com).
DOI: 10.30395/WSR.202512_19(1).0003
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