Digital Object Identifier
Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle examines Black life in 1960s Harlem through the lens of crime, business and social pressure. This paper analyses how racial perception shapes identity and survival in the novel. The study focuses on Ray Carney, a furniture dealer navigating between respectable society and Harlem’s criminal underground. His shifting identity reveals the personal cost of navigating a racially structured world. The study applies W.E.B Du Bois’s double consciousness and Ralph Ellison’s racial invisibility as its theoretical frameworks. Through close reading of Carney’s business dealings and social interactions, the study examines how racial surveillance governs self-presentation and limits opportunity. His experience reflects twoness, invisibility in white civic spaces and the veil operating within Harlem through class divisions. The analysis finds that his fragmented identity is a structural imposition. It is reproduced by white non-recognition downtown and by class hierarchies within Harlem itself. This paper concludes that Harlem offers no true freedom. Black survival demands constant self-reinvention under an enduring racial gaze.
Dr. B.R. Veeramani, Ms. D. Durgalakshmi. “Shadow of Harlem: Black Visibility and Urban Survival in Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 318-330. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.21.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
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