What does it mean to write African American literature after the end of legalized segregation?
In this study of Colson Whitehead's first six novels Marlon Lieber argues that this question
has permeated the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's writing since his 1999 debut The
Intuitionist. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology and Marxist critical theory
Lieber shows that Whitehead's oeuvre articulates the tension between the persistent presence of
racism and transformations in the United States' class structure which reveals new modes of
abjection. At the same time Whitehead imagines forms of writing that strive to transcend the
histories of domination objectified in social structures and embodied in the form of habitus.
