Cultural Guerrilla Warfare through Double Encoding: On the Dual Cultural Politics of Black Music in The Underground Railroad

Abstract

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad positions Black music at the core of racial power dynamics through its narrative experiment in reconstructing the history of American slavery. This paper employs a “dual cultural politics” theoretical framework, integrating Foucault’s theory of discipline with perspectives from Black cultural studies, to analyze the dialectics of musical forms like work songs and spirituals within the novel. On one hand, white slave owners transform music into a “gentle violence” that disciplines the bodies of the enslaved and weakens their consciousness of resistance by controlling its rhythm, lyrics, and performance contexts. On the other hand, enslaved Africans adopted a “dual-coding” strategy to reconfigure musical meaning. Through metaphorical lyrics, collective rhythms, and improvisational variations, they transformed music into a covert medium for transmitting escape signals, sustaining cultural roots, and galvanizing resistance. This contradiction reveals the survival wisdom of Black culture within the context of slavery—within the cracks of power discipline, through the creative transformation of tools of oppression, they constructed a cultural space of resistance that neither detaches itself from the shackles of reality nor fails to break through the barriers of power.