When Is an "Alternate History" Not an Alternate History? Amazon's Forthcoming Series, "The Underground Railroad"

In light of Amazon’s newly released trailers for its nine-part series adapting Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad, (see LINK) it would appear that the wave of alternate histories coming to streaming services is continuing unabated.  

Or is it?  

Although the marketing for the series uniformly describes it as an “alternate history,” it does not really display the genre’s traditional features.  The novel, which I read after it first appeared and very much enjoyed, does not deliver the kind of counterfactual exposition that devotees of alternate history have come to expect.  

The Southern states in which the novel’s action unfolds, do not seem to exist in a world where the Confederacy either won or lost the war.  (In this sense, the novel is very different from Ben Winters' 2016 novel, Underground Airlines, which is very much a work of alternate history).  They are defamiliarized versions of their real historical selves, which has a jarring effect on the reader expecting traditional allohistorical world-building.    

If anything, the novel (and series presumably) might seem to conform more to the model of a “secret history,” in the sense that little of the action seems to alter the course of history.  

And yet, we do learn that the treatment of Black slaves in certain states like North and South Carolina are much worse than in “real” history, being subjected to complete physical eradication and genetic experiments.  Dramatic (nightmarish) changes have somehow taken place.  And so “secret history” does not really work.  

What about “magical history?”  

This term was floated by Michael Docherty in a recent essay entitled, “To ‘Refract Time’: The Magical History of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad,” published in Ruth Maxey, ed., 21st Century US Historical Fiction Contemporary Responses to the Past (2020).  

Docherty writes of The Underground Railroad:  

“The term “alternate” history does not comfortably fit Whitehead’s novel….We are not asked, “what if?” by Whitehead’s world; it is not a vision of how things could have transpired under other circumstances but ultimately did not. Rather, his states [of the Confederacy] are best understood allegorically. That is, they refer and respond to ideas and events that were and are part of our world, our historical timeline; it is only the spatiotemporal form in which they are presented for ease of narrative exploration that is ahistorical. As “takes” on the United States, these are not visions of alternative Americas but alternative expressions of conditions manifest in the America we already know. Thus, Whitehead does not offer a speculative fiction; he remains in the historical novelist’s business of seeking to explore the ways in which our actual past has come to affect our actual present….It is merely that Whitehead chooses to do so, paradoxically, by presenting a vision of that real past that does not correspond, in its chronological, geographical, or technological forms, to the historical record.”  

Docherty goes on to write: 

“This is why I am here venturing the term magical history. The impossible, ahistorical elements of the novel are not in conflict with its wealth of well-researched, finely observed historical detail but rather are how that wealth of detail is reconstituted and catalyzed to tell a bigger story…Whitehead levers ahistoricity precisely to imbricate his narrative in a deeper and broader sense of the sweep of American racial history than would otherwise have been possible in a single conventional historical narrative. If magical realism is the paradoxical literary art of using the utterly unreal and the mystifying to penetrate more effectively the mysteries of a given reality, then Whitehead’s magical history is a project that similarly flies in the face of the historical record precisely to grasp it more firmly.”  

So The Underground Railroad – as a novel and, presumably, as a streaming series, is NOT a work of alternate history.  

That being said, The Underground Railroad will surely benefit from the cultural cachet that alternate history has acquired in contemporary American popular culture and will, in turn, reinforce it in its own right.    

Which is all to the good.