In his seventh novel Colson Whitehead fictionalizes the recent outrageous discovery of clandestine mass graves at Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a reformatory in Marianna, Florida. During its 111 years of existence, Dozier became the target of various investigations as rumors about maltreatment of its juvenile detainees were sporadically spread. Whitehead focuses on the mass graves, specifically on the black corpses found there, and writes out a fictional narrative for these black bodies as a form to reject forgetting and unbury a scandalous event that most Americans would prefer not to be informed about. Through Mbembe's concept of necropolitics, I claim that The Nickel Boys reveals another scandal: the persistent necropolitical nature of United States' incarceration system. My argument is that the palimpsest structure of the novel as it juxtaposes the prison novel with the (neo)slave narrative eventually creates a precise illustration of Mbembe's critique of modern democracies as postulated in his concept of necropolitics.
