Bare Life, Violence, and Derealization in The Nickel Boys

This article focuses on the notions of ‘derealization’ and ‘violence’ to discuss the status of the racial ‘other’ in The Nickel Boys (2019), the acclaimed work of African-American writer, Colson Whitehead, from the perspective of new left thinkers and critics. Drawing on the views of Butler and Slovej Žižek, this paper argues why the United States of America, despite its democratic claims, has been torn by apartheid. To this end, the notions of ‘subjective’ violence, ‘objective’ violence, and ‘grief’ are discussed to depict such strategies as derealization which were deployed against the racial ‘other’ to eliminate him gradually from American society. It is argued that with the emergence of the ‘biopolitical’ structure and its focus on the management of the body, the hierarchy of ‘us and them’ was not done away with. On the contrary, it just replaced the old strategy of ethnic cleansing with a panopticon one which managed the racial ‘other’ by ‘derealizing’ and, thus, reducing him into a ghostly figure of ungrievable life who would be vanished soon. It can be drawn that in this system, the racial ‘other’ stands somewhere between death and life leading an Agambian ‘bare life’ of liminality in which he is treated as less than human.