Panel. Slavery and its Futures: Liberation, Survival, Trauma

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

24-7-2018 3:30 PM

Description

  • Loosh / Michael Gorra, Smith College
    This paper uses the character of Loosh (Lucius) from The Unvanquished (1938) as an entry point into the conditions of slavery in Faulkner’s world. Basic questions. First, what are the conditions of servitude on the Sartoris plantation? How many slaves are there, what do they work at, how are they treated—and how does that correspond to what we know of the historical record (WPA narratives, Chandra Manning, John Eaton among other sources)? Second, how does freedom arrive in Faulkner’s imagined community? Loosh goes off with the Union army, having shown them where the Sartoris family silver is buried? What kind of world is he stepping into? What future—what fate—can we imagine for him once he has left Faulkner’s pages?
  • On Endurance: Capitalism and Slavery from “Red Leaves” to Dilsey’s Vision / Robert Jackson, University of Tulsa
    Taking the long view of natural history from primeval forest, which would later become the State of Mississippi, through generations of slavery, including the enslavement of Africans by indigenous Americans, Faulkner indicts the ideology of capitalism itself as the source of contemporary corruption and decline. Doing so, his historical sweep into the early 1940s, on the eve of American involvement in World War II, invokes slavery in order to engage its afterlives in such permutations as global financial markets, New Deal interventions, and inexorable military conflicts. Here I consider New South business culture, especially its conflation of southern economic boosterism and segregationist ideology, as the object of Faulkner’s critique. In short stories such as “Red Leaves” (1930) as well as major worksAbsalom, Absalom! (1936) and Go Down, Moses (1942), Faulkner's meditations on slavery invite comparison with the matrix of economic and racial subjugation in his own time.
  • Surrender as Healing: Liminality and Faulkner’s Psychological Trappings of Whiteness in the (Post)-Slave South / Amber Zinni, Smith College
    Through a psychoanalytic relational lens, I explore how the conditions of the postwar South, specifically the dismantling of slavery, could be experienced as a historical/transgenerational trauma to white individuals and white identity. For Faulkner’s white characters to psychologically survive the surrender of the Confederate South requires embracing or detaching from liminality and frequently cementing oneself as a “done-to,” a victim whose inability to enter “third” dialogic spaces can prevent personal healing and reinforce white supremacy. This is a significant, persistent pattern in Faulkner’s work, and particularly relevant in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Sound and The Fury (1929). Specifically, I am interested in Rosa Coldfield’s sessions with her hand-chosen young therapist, Quentin Compson, and how their relationship depicts transgenerational trauma. Alternating positions within their own clinical relationship, Quentin Compson and Rosa Coldfield’s individual and historical understandings/experiences of liminality and trauma interplay to create unique outcomes for each character.

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Jul 24th, 3:30 PM

Panel. Slavery and its Futures: Liberation, Survival, Trauma

Nutt Auditorium

  • Loosh / Michael Gorra, Smith College
    This paper uses the character of Loosh (Lucius) from The Unvanquished (1938) as an entry point into the conditions of slavery in Faulkner’s world. Basic questions. First, what are the conditions of servitude on the Sartoris plantation? How many slaves are there, what do they work at, how are they treated—and how does that correspond to what we know of the historical record (WPA narratives, Chandra Manning, John Eaton among other sources)? Second, how does freedom arrive in Faulkner’s imagined community? Loosh goes off with the Union army, having shown them where the Sartoris family silver is buried? What kind of world is he stepping into? What future—what fate—can we imagine for him once he has left Faulkner’s pages?
  • On Endurance: Capitalism and Slavery from “Red Leaves” to Dilsey’s Vision / Robert Jackson, University of Tulsa
    Taking the long view of natural history from primeval forest, which would later become the State of Mississippi, through generations of slavery, including the enslavement of Africans by indigenous Americans, Faulkner indicts the ideology of capitalism itself as the source of contemporary corruption and decline. Doing so, his historical sweep into the early 1940s, on the eve of American involvement in World War II, invokes slavery in order to engage its afterlives in such permutations as global financial markets, New Deal interventions, and inexorable military conflicts. Here I consider New South business culture, especially its conflation of southern economic boosterism and segregationist ideology, as the object of Faulkner’s critique. In short stories such as “Red Leaves” (1930) as well as major worksAbsalom, Absalom! (1936) and Go Down, Moses (1942), Faulkner's meditations on slavery invite comparison with the matrix of economic and racial subjugation in his own time.
  • Surrender as Healing: Liminality and Faulkner’s Psychological Trappings of Whiteness in the (Post)-Slave South / Amber Zinni, Smith College
    Through a psychoanalytic relational lens, I explore how the conditions of the postwar South, specifically the dismantling of slavery, could be experienced as a historical/transgenerational trauma to white individuals and white identity. For Faulkner’s white characters to psychologically survive the surrender of the Confederate South requires embracing or detaching from liminality and frequently cementing oneself as a “done-to,” a victim whose inability to enter “third” dialogic spaces can prevent personal healing and reinforce white supremacy. This is a significant, persistent pattern in Faulkner’s work, and particularly relevant in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Sound and The Fury (1929). Specifically, I am interested in Rosa Coldfield’s sessions with her hand-chosen young therapist, Quentin Compson, and how their relationship depicts transgenerational trauma. Alternating positions within their own clinical relationship, Quentin Compson and Rosa Coldfield’s individual and historical understandings/experiences of liminality and trauma interplay to create unique outcomes for each character.