Perpetual Tipping Points: Unnatural Narratology, Liminality, and Race in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One

Jaya Shrivastava

doi:10.18778/2196-8403.2025.04

Authors

Dr. Jaya Shrivastava National Institute of Technology Srinagar https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3491-7285

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2196-8403.2025.04

Keywords:

Colson Whitehead, unnatural narratology, recursive temporality, racial trauma, post-apocalyptic fiction, defamiliarization

Abstract

Colson Whitehead’s Zone One subverts historical rupture by unsettling apocalyptic conventions and collapsing binaries of past/present, life/death, and progress/stasis. Drawing on Jan Alber’s unnatural narratology and Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, this paper argues that the novel reframes survival as recursive inertia rather than renewal. The paper also builds on the concept of perpetual tipping points to describe how the novel’s narrative resists closure through cyclical temporality, bureaucratic monotony, and racial deferral that expose the persistence of systemic failure in a zombified American landscape. Zone One thus becomes a haunting meditation on trauma, race, and the illusion of transformation in the aftermath of collapse.

Author Biography

Dr. Jaya Shrivastava, National Institute of Technology Srinagar

Is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences & Management at the National Institute of Technology Srinagar (J&K, India). She earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from IIT Indore, specializing in cognitive narratology and the works of Colson Whitehead. Her research spans contemporary African American literature, narratology, and cognitive poetics. She has published in journals like Asiatic and ANQ and presented at MIT and Durham University. Her work explores the intersections of narrative, cognition, and cultural studies, contributing to interdisciplinary literary discourse.

References

Alber, Jan (2009): Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them. In: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 1:79-96.

Alber, Jan (2013): Unnatural Narrative. In: Hühn, Peter et al. (eds.): The Living Handbook of Narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/unnatural-narrative (17.11.2013).

Alber, Jan (2016): Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln.

Aldama, Frederick Luis (2010): Towards a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts. Austin.

Beckett, Samuel (1954): Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. New York.

Berlant, Lauren (2011): Cruel Optimism. Durham.

Bose, Maria (2019): Distantly Reading Race in the Contemporary “Postrace” Novel. In: Textual Practice, 33 (10):1653-1670: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2019.1651761.

Brooks, Max (2006): World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. New York.

Browne, S.G. (2009): Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament. New York.

Caruth, Cathy (1996): Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore.

Dendle, Peter (2007): The Zombie as Barometer of Cultural Anxiety. In: At the Interface: Probing the Boundaries 38. Brill Academic Publishers, 45-57: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401204811_005.

Dyson, Michael Eric (2011): Foreword. In: Touré: Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness: What It Means to Be Black Now. New York / London, xiii-xx.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1922 / 2006): The Waste Land. In: The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. by Michael North. New York.

Fisher, Mark (2009): Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester.

Genette, Gérard (1980): Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca.

Gordon, Avery (1997): Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis.

Hunt, Nigel C. (2010): Memory, War and Trauma. Cambridge / New York.

Hurley, Jessica (2015): History Is What Bites: Zombies, Race, and the Limits of Biopower in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. In: Extrapolation, 56 (3):311-333.

Hurston, Zora Neale (1938): Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. Philadelphia.

Janoff-Bulman Ronnie (1992): Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma. New York.

Lauro, Sarah Juliet (2017): “Introduction: Wander and Wonder in Zombieland.” In: Dies. (ed.): Zombie Theory: A Reader. Minneapolis, VII–XXIV.

Li, Stephanie (2011): Signifying Without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama. New Brunswick.

Mann, Justin L. (2021): Black Insecurity at the End of the World. In: MELUS: Multi-

Ethnic Literature of the United States, 46(3):103-124.

Morrison, Toni (1992): Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA.

Morrison, Toni (2008): Predicting the Past. Interview by Susanna Rustin. In: The Guardian, 01.11.2008. URL: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/01/toni-morrison (07.07.2014).

Romero, George A. (1968): Night of the Living Dead [film]. Pittsburgh.

Romero, George A. (1978): Dawn of the Dead [film]. Pittsburgh.

Seabrook, William (1929): The Magic Island. New York.

Shklovsky, Viktor (1917): Art as Technique. In: Lodge, David (ed.): Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. London 1988, 16-30.

Shklovsky, Viktor (1917 / 1965): Art as Technique. In: Lemon, Lee T. / Reis, Marion J. (eds.): Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln, 3-24.

Sorensen, Leif (2014): Against the Post-Apocalyptic: Narrative Closure in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. In: Contemporary Literature 55 (3):559-592.

Touré (2011): Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness: What It Means to Be Black Now. New York.

Turner, Victor (1969): The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago.

Warren, Kenneth W. (2011): What Was African American Literature? Cambridge, MA.

Whitehead, Colson (2011): Zone One. London.