Panel. Yakni Patafa: Faulkner, Land, and Indigenous Critical Perspectives

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

18-7-2016 3:00 PM

Description

  • Red Laughter: Humor in Faulkner's Native Narratives / John Wharton Lowe, University of Georgia
    William Faulkner’s portraits of Native Americans have been hotly debated; his lack of deep knowledge of Mississippi’s Native culture forced him to invent rather generously. To his credit, however, he nevertheless presented multi-faceted characters, who range from the appalling to the appealing, as they display a full range of human feelings and responses to the environment they inhabit. A little explored aspect of these tales is their humor. As Faulkner seems to have known, Native cultures in Mississippi employed humor in virtually every aspect of their daily lives. This is apparent in several ways, and is most evident in Faulkner’s underrated story, “A Courtship,” but also in “Lo.” Accordingly, this paper will outline Faulkner’s uses of humor in these tales, and then relate it to actual Native American humor.
  • Shakbatina's Revenge, Quentin's Malaise, and Cyclic Temporality (or Yakni Patafa in Shell Shaker and Absalom, Absalom! / Kirstin L. Squint, High Point University
    In the works of Choctaw writer, LeAnne Howe, characters return physically and/or metaphysically to the Mississippi lands from which they emerged as a people. Her novel, Shell Shaker, set in both the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, bookends the South’s settler colonial civil war, and provides insight into William Faulkner’s moral reflections on the institution of slavery and its cascading effects into the lives of his early twentieth-century characters. The century-crossing healing ceremony of Shell Shaker intervenes specifically in the cycle of abuse bemoaned by Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!. My paper will consider Jodi Byrd’s conception of yakni patafa (furrowed/plowed/split open land) as critical praxis, arguing that Shell Shaker’s depiction of Choctaws reunited across time and space, despite the erasures of Removal, offers a more “furrowed” reading of Southern history and culture than the hopeless picture of destruction born from a lineage of racist patriarchy offered by Absalom, Absalom!.
  • "Land! Hold On! Just Hold On!": Hard Times and Sacred Land in "Old Man" and My Louisiana Love / Gina Caison, Georgia State University
    This paper interrogates the space between water and land in William Faulkner’s “Old Man” section of The Wild Palms and Houma filmmaker Monique Verdin’s documentary My Louisiana Love (2012), which recounts Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. Using the critical framework of yakni patafa, or furrowed land, this paper examines moments when rushing flood waters or deep-sea oil ruptures consume the earth, and it interrogates the epistemological claims that such moments entail for both Faulkner and Verdin. Recognizing the narrative time signature of rising water asks that we let go of a romantic land-based narratives in order to take on the very real ecological challenges facing the Deep South today. This work must encompass the indigenous knowledges of those who have called the region home for much longer than a “southern” framework might allow.

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Jul 18th, 3:00 PM

Panel. Yakni Patafa: Faulkner, Land, and Indigenous Critical Perspectives

Nutt Auditorium

  • Red Laughter: Humor in Faulkner's Native Narratives / John Wharton Lowe, University of Georgia
    William Faulkner’s portraits of Native Americans have been hotly debated; his lack of deep knowledge of Mississippi’s Native culture forced him to invent rather generously. To his credit, however, he nevertheless presented multi-faceted characters, who range from the appalling to the appealing, as they display a full range of human feelings and responses to the environment they inhabit. A little explored aspect of these tales is their humor. As Faulkner seems to have known, Native cultures in Mississippi employed humor in virtually every aspect of their daily lives. This is apparent in several ways, and is most evident in Faulkner’s underrated story, “A Courtship,” but also in “Lo.” Accordingly, this paper will outline Faulkner’s uses of humor in these tales, and then relate it to actual Native American humor.
  • Shakbatina's Revenge, Quentin's Malaise, and Cyclic Temporality (or Yakni Patafa in Shell Shaker and Absalom, Absalom! / Kirstin L. Squint, High Point University
    In the works of Choctaw writer, LeAnne Howe, characters return physically and/or metaphysically to the Mississippi lands from which they emerged as a people. Her novel, Shell Shaker, set in both the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, bookends the South’s settler colonial civil war, and provides insight into William Faulkner’s moral reflections on the institution of slavery and its cascading effects into the lives of his early twentieth-century characters. The century-crossing healing ceremony of Shell Shaker intervenes specifically in the cycle of abuse bemoaned by Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!. My paper will consider Jodi Byrd’s conception of yakni patafa (furrowed/plowed/split open land) as critical praxis, arguing that Shell Shaker’s depiction of Choctaws reunited across time and space, despite the erasures of Removal, offers a more “furrowed” reading of Southern history and culture than the hopeless picture of destruction born from a lineage of racist patriarchy offered by Absalom, Absalom!.
  • "Land! Hold On! Just Hold On!": Hard Times and Sacred Land in "Old Man" and My Louisiana Love / Gina Caison, Georgia State University
    This paper interrogates the space between water and land in William Faulkner’s “Old Man” section of The Wild Palms and Houma filmmaker Monique Verdin’s documentary My Louisiana Love (2012), which recounts Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. Using the critical framework of yakni patafa, or furrowed land, this paper examines moments when rushing flood waters or deep-sea oil ruptures consume the earth, and it interrogates the epistemological claims that such moments entail for both Faulkner and Verdin. Recognizing the narrative time signature of rising water asks that we let go of a romantic land-based narratives in order to take on the very real ecological challenges facing the Deep South today. This work must encompass the indigenous knowledges of those who have called the region home for much longer than a “southern” framework might allow.