Carceral Continuities and Racialized Subject Formation: A Foucauldian Reading of The Nickel Boys

Abstract

This article examines Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys (2019) through the theoretical lens of Michel Foucault's concepts of discipline, surveillance, delinquency, biopolitics, and counter-memory. It argues that Nickel Academy operates as a racialized disciplinary institution that produces and regulates Black subjectivity through surveillance, punishment, and institutional control. Situating the novel within the historical continuum of slavery, Black Codes, convict leasing, and Jim Crow segregation, the article demonstrates how racial domination persists through changing technologies of power rather than disappearing with legal reform. It further explores how Whitehead recovers suppressed histories of racial violence, transforming the novel into a form of counter-memory that challenges official narratives of justice and rehabilitation. Ultimately, the article contends that The Nickel Boys exposes the reform school as a mechanism of racial governance, revealing the enduring continuity of disciplinary and biopolitical power in modern America.