Panel. History, Fiction, and Interracial Intimacies in Faulkner

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

21-7-2014 3:30 PM

Description

  • Account Ability: Race, History, and the White Southern Literary Imagination / Lael Gold
    Concerning their approaches to black history and the history of black-white relations, illuminating comparisons and contrasts can be drawn between Faulkner and Margaret Wrinkle. Both white, Southern authors share a legacy of ancestral complicity in slavery and the poignancy of childhood nurture and attachment across racial lines. Like Go Down, Moses, Wrinkle’s novel Wash depicts frustrated white encounters with recondite, vaguely threatening African sacred ritual and also oblivious white characters’ ineffectual attempts at intimacy with African Americans in their midst. Like Faulkner, Wrinkle bears witness across the remains of the same barriers that divide her white and black characters. Both also link their writing with historical scholarship by representing the sort of documents used as primary sources. Although one usually looks to the field of accounting for the most dispassionate recording of facts, the slave ledgers foregrounded by Faulkner and Wrinkle profoundly unsettle their characters in ways that speak volumes.
  • Seeing Across the Divide: Recreating a Suppressed History / Margaret Wrinkle
    Wash was inspired by a rumor that a slaveholding ancestor of mine may have been involved in the breeding of enslaved people. At the heart of this story lies a secret ledger containing the details of this hidden practice. Such a ledger would provide the proof that historians need, just like Ike McCaslin’s ledger allowed him to piece together a related horrific truth in “The Bear.” But complex forces have endangered both the creation and survival of any written historical document containing the whole truth of slavery. Given these dynamics, how do we see across the divides of time, race, gender and power? Paradoxically, when writing about a region where the interpretation of reality has been so contested, fiction may form the strongest bridge. I will discuss my journey from history into fiction and read a few key scenes from the novel about the secret life of this lost ledger.
  • Stranger Than Fiction: Faulkner, Wrinkle, Slavery, and History / Calvin Schermerhorn, Arizona State University
    This paper details historical records of sexual violence in nineteenth-century United States slavery, juxtaposing them with William Faulkner’s and Margaret Wrinkle’s representations of sexuality and intimacy across divides of race and slavery in the American South. In “The Bear” (1942), Faulkner textures accounts of sexual abuse and the personal violence of a slaveholder’s domination with humor and absurdity, layering them in time. In Wrinkle’s Wash (2013), Wash and his lover Pallas are exposed to cross-currents of owner-manipulated sexual aggression, Pallas when hired out to serve the violent fantasies of white slaveholders, and Wash when employed as the progenitor of enslaved offspring. Historical records of the United States domestic slave trade reveal counterpoints, including sexual violence and predation. Yet historical subjects seem to have evaded the moral accounting that holds together novelistic treatments of the Slave South.
  • Some Sort of Love? Black-White Intimacies in Antebellum America / Sharony Green
    "But there must have been love he thought. Some sort of love. Even what he would have called love: not just an afternoon's or a night's spittoon." Ike McCaslin, “The Bear” Some have argued that to be enslaved was to be forced into a legal arrangement that excluded the possibility for expressive moments. This discussion offers an opportunity to rethink such logic and suggest an answer to McCaslin’s poignant thought. Before the Civil War, many southern white men did something that went little discussed: free his enslaved women and the children she produced with him. Many ended up in Ohio, a place easily accessible by river. Using letters, some from freed people, this paper cautiously draws attention to the ways in which white men made a different kind of investment in human capital, an emotional one. Though oppression was ever-present, sometimes emotional exchanges went both ways.

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Jul 21st, 3:30 PM

Panel. History, Fiction, and Interracial Intimacies in Faulkner

Nutt Auditorium

  • Account Ability: Race, History, and the White Southern Literary Imagination / Lael Gold
    Concerning their approaches to black history and the history of black-white relations, illuminating comparisons and contrasts can be drawn between Faulkner and Margaret Wrinkle. Both white, Southern authors share a legacy of ancestral complicity in slavery and the poignancy of childhood nurture and attachment across racial lines. Like Go Down, Moses, Wrinkle’s novel Wash depicts frustrated white encounters with recondite, vaguely threatening African sacred ritual and also oblivious white characters’ ineffectual attempts at intimacy with African Americans in their midst. Like Faulkner, Wrinkle bears witness across the remains of the same barriers that divide her white and black characters. Both also link their writing with historical scholarship by representing the sort of documents used as primary sources. Although one usually looks to the field of accounting for the most dispassionate recording of facts, the slave ledgers foregrounded by Faulkner and Wrinkle profoundly unsettle their characters in ways that speak volumes.
  • Seeing Across the Divide: Recreating a Suppressed History / Margaret Wrinkle
    Wash was inspired by a rumor that a slaveholding ancestor of mine may have been involved in the breeding of enslaved people. At the heart of this story lies a secret ledger containing the details of this hidden practice. Such a ledger would provide the proof that historians need, just like Ike McCaslin’s ledger allowed him to piece together a related horrific truth in “The Bear.” But complex forces have endangered both the creation and survival of any written historical document containing the whole truth of slavery. Given these dynamics, how do we see across the divides of time, race, gender and power? Paradoxically, when writing about a region where the interpretation of reality has been so contested, fiction may form the strongest bridge. I will discuss my journey from history into fiction and read a few key scenes from the novel about the secret life of this lost ledger.
  • Stranger Than Fiction: Faulkner, Wrinkle, Slavery, and History / Calvin Schermerhorn, Arizona State University
    This paper details historical records of sexual violence in nineteenth-century United States slavery, juxtaposing them with William Faulkner’s and Margaret Wrinkle’s representations of sexuality and intimacy across divides of race and slavery in the American South. In “The Bear” (1942), Faulkner textures accounts of sexual abuse and the personal violence of a slaveholder’s domination with humor and absurdity, layering them in time. In Wrinkle’s Wash (2013), Wash and his lover Pallas are exposed to cross-currents of owner-manipulated sexual aggression, Pallas when hired out to serve the violent fantasies of white slaveholders, and Wash when employed as the progenitor of enslaved offspring. Historical records of the United States domestic slave trade reveal counterpoints, including sexual violence and predation. Yet historical subjects seem to have evaded the moral accounting that holds together novelistic treatments of the Slave South.
  • Some Sort of Love? Black-White Intimacies in Antebellum America / Sharony Green
    "But there must have been love he thought. Some sort of love. Even what he would have called love: not just an afternoon's or a night's spittoon." Ike McCaslin, “The Bear” Some have argued that to be enslaved was to be forced into a legal arrangement that excluded the possibility for expressive moments. This discussion offers an opportunity to rethink such logic and suggest an answer to McCaslin’s poignant thought. Before the Civil War, many southern white men did something that went little discussed: free his enslaved women and the children she produced with him. Many ended up in Ohio, a place easily accessible by river. Using letters, some from freed people, this paper cautiously draws attention to the ways in which white men made a different kind of investment in human capital, an emotional one. Though oppression was ever-present, sometimes emotional exchanges went both ways.