Jackson, Thomas James (2026) Aesthetics of Disruption: Authorial Interventionism, Intersectionality and Genre Play in Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days (2001), Sag Harbor (2009), Zone One (2011), and The Nickel Boys (2019). Doctoral thesis, York St John University.

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Abstract

This thesis examines the fiction of Colson Whitehead through an analysis of four novels published between 2001 and 2019: John Henry Days (2001), Sag Harbor (2009), Zone One (2011), and The Nickel Boys (2019). While existing literary scholarship has often approached these texts separately, and through discrete lenses of race, history, satire, or genre, this study argues for a coherent literary aesthetic across Whitehead’s oeuvre, defined by interventionism, genre play, intertextuality, metatextuality and bricolage.

It contends that Whitehead is an interventionist author whose fiction mobilises genre, not merely as a stylistic choice, but as a methodological and operative framework through which dominant literary and historiographic paradigms are interrogated, exposed and revised. Through close textual analysis informed by Critical Race Theory and intersectionality, hauntology, rememory, and historiographic metafiction, the thesis examines how the Bildungsroman, historical realism, and zombie apocalypse fiction are repurposed to interrogate the narratological limits of genre forms when representing African American histories and subjectivities.

The thesis ultimately argues that Whitehead’s fiction produces an alternative literary ontology: one that identifies structures of epistemic violence and historical erasure, proposes formal remedies through speculation and counterstorytelling, and enacts those remedies within the novels themselves. These texts therefore come to operate as forms of narrative praxis in which critique and literary practice are mutually constitutive, through a sustained analysis of Whitehead’s work, his project demonstrates how genre fiction can function as a serious mode of historical critique and aesthetic intervention.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Status:	Published
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
School/Department:	School of Humanities
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/15560

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