‘This Making of Truth is Violence Too,Out of Which Facts are Formed’: Colson Whitehead's Secret History of Post-Reconstruction America in John Henry Days

Abstract

Colson Whiteheads novel John Henry Days is part of a large trend in contemporary (post-Cold War) American literature of exploring overlooked or alternative historical currents as a means of coming to terms with the complexities, contradictions, and epistemological uncertainties of postmodern America. This essay argues that John Henry Days can be understood as a kind of secret history of the post-Reconstruction United States, charting a panoply of rhizomatic cultural meanderings, tangents, false starts, and subaltern strivings that paint this passage of time as defined by a repetitious series of self-sacrificing struggles against epochal new technologies in the process of radically reordering the social landscape and redefining the nature of humanity.