The Case of Territory and Spatial Justice in Whitehead's The Underground Railroad: A Westphalian-Sojian Analysis

Abstract

Drawing on Westphal's (2011) geocriticism and  Soja's (2010) theory of spatial justice, current research, adopting Belsey's textual analysis method, investigates Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016) as a sustained argument about territory. It considers who is permitted to claim land, to defend it, and to pass it on. This article argues that the novel stages four competing territorial claims, the plantation's claim of ownership, the state's claim of jurisdiction, North Carolina's claim of exclusion, and Valentine Farm's claim of Black self-determination, and that novelist's prose encodes the legal, spatial, and violent mechanics of each claim with a precision that rewards Soja's distinction between distributive and procedural justice. The analysis situates the reading within the broader tradition of spatial justice theory associated with Lefebvre, Harvey, Young, and the environmental justice scholarship of  Bullard and Pulido. The article closes by proposing that territory, rather than landscape alone, should be treated as a distinct fourth category within geocritical method when a text stages competing legal claims to land.