Faulkner and the World Culture of the Global South

Nutt Auditorium

Faulkner situates the history of U.S. cultural and narrative forms in the context of the larger histories of the hemispheric Americas in ways that are defining of the relationship between U.S. and Latin American fiction. In this paper, I argue that it is important to ask what happens if we pay attention to these inter-American connections in Faulkner’s works. How does the recognition of these transnational features affect our understanding of Faulkner in particular and American (literary) modernisms generally? I explore what emerges from a view of Faulkner in relation to what we may term the “global South.” I suggest that viewing Faulkner in this manner offers the possibility of understanding him not simply as a writer of the American South but also as a chronicler of the world culture of the global South.