Panel. Faulkner and African American Representations of Slavery

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

25-7-2018 9:30 AM

Description

  • Beyond the Door of the Big House: Slavery and Poor Whites in Faulkner, Douglass, and Jacobs / Andrew B. Leiter, Lycoming College
    A comparative analysis of Faulkner’s fiction and African American slave narratives, this essay addresses the relationships between slaves and lower-class whites. Faulkner frequently depicts antipathy between poor whites and African Americans as a product of poor white resentment specific to their economic and social displacement. Contextualizing this presentation within the historical record and the slave narratives, this essay reverses traditional critical considerations of poor whites and slavery in Faulkner’s fiction. Those traditional considerations address what the slave economy means for the condition of poor whites in the antebellum South. They do not, however, address how the poor white presence defines Faulkner’s construction of slavery. The overt political implications of the slave narratives not only reveal the limitations of Faulkner’s slave world but they also reveal how the poor white presence mitigates the conditions of slavery in Faulkner’s fiction by displacing the brutalities of slavery with poor white suffering.
  • Better Than Ben-Hur; More Real Than Roots: Slavery, Representation, and Collaboration in Absalom, Absalom! and Kindred / Tim A. Ryan, Northern Illinois University
    While numerous scholars have discussed Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) as a rewriting of Absalom, Absalom! (1936), no one has explored how an earlier African American novel about slavery, Octavia Butler’s time-travel fantasy Kindred (1979), similarly engages in dialogue with Faulkner’s masterpiece. Among numerous narrative and thematic parallels—including unacknowledged interracial kinship, the threat of incest, obsessive efforts to perpetuate a family line, and the politics of narrating slavery—Absalom and Kindred are fundamentally concerned with both the potential of creative collaboration and the risks it poses to individual integrity. Whether in the nineteenth or twentieth century, during slavery or after emancipation, both novels depict a world in which there is a disturbingly thin line between cooperation and exploitation, love and domination, intimacy and violation—and between partnership and enslavement.
  • Melodrama, Turbulence, Titillation: Silhouetting Slavery in the Works of William Faulkner and Kara Walker / Randall Wilhelm, Anderson University
    This paper places Faulkner’s aesthetic of narrative silhouetting in conversation with contemporary visual artist Kara Walker, whose silhouette figures drawn from literary sources such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone With the Wind subvert the clichés and stereotypes of literary plantation life through their violent, satiric, and erotic postures. Viewing Faulkner’s work with slavery through the lens of Walker’s disturbing figure ensembles opens new ways of seeing Faulkner’s silhouette strategies in passages that feature racial, sexual, and erotic power. Faulkner’s methods function similarly to Walker’s silhouettes where several bodies blend into one black shape where body parts, individual identities, and racial distinctions are subsumed. The effect for both Faulkner and Walker is a kind of turbulence that is not unlike melodrama in its dredging up of contradictory and vibrant affectivities.

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Jul 25th, 9:30 AM

Panel. Faulkner and African American Representations of Slavery

Nutt Auditorium

  • Beyond the Door of the Big House: Slavery and Poor Whites in Faulkner, Douglass, and Jacobs / Andrew B. Leiter, Lycoming College
    A comparative analysis of Faulkner’s fiction and African American slave narratives, this essay addresses the relationships between slaves and lower-class whites. Faulkner frequently depicts antipathy between poor whites and African Americans as a product of poor white resentment specific to their economic and social displacement. Contextualizing this presentation within the historical record and the slave narratives, this essay reverses traditional critical considerations of poor whites and slavery in Faulkner’s fiction. Those traditional considerations address what the slave economy means for the condition of poor whites in the antebellum South. They do not, however, address how the poor white presence defines Faulkner’s construction of slavery. The overt political implications of the slave narratives not only reveal the limitations of Faulkner’s slave world but they also reveal how the poor white presence mitigates the conditions of slavery in Faulkner’s fiction by displacing the brutalities of slavery with poor white suffering.
  • Better Than Ben-Hur; More Real Than Roots: Slavery, Representation, and Collaboration in Absalom, Absalom! and Kindred / Tim A. Ryan, Northern Illinois University
    While numerous scholars have discussed Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) as a rewriting of Absalom, Absalom! (1936), no one has explored how an earlier African American novel about slavery, Octavia Butler’s time-travel fantasy Kindred (1979), similarly engages in dialogue with Faulkner’s masterpiece. Among numerous narrative and thematic parallels—including unacknowledged interracial kinship, the threat of incest, obsessive efforts to perpetuate a family line, and the politics of narrating slavery—Absalom and Kindred are fundamentally concerned with both the potential of creative collaboration and the risks it poses to individual integrity. Whether in the nineteenth or twentieth century, during slavery or after emancipation, both novels depict a world in which there is a disturbingly thin line between cooperation and exploitation, love and domination, intimacy and violation—and between partnership and enslavement.
  • Melodrama, Turbulence, Titillation: Silhouetting Slavery in the Works of William Faulkner and Kara Walker / Randall Wilhelm, Anderson University
    This paper places Faulkner’s aesthetic of narrative silhouetting in conversation with contemporary visual artist Kara Walker, whose silhouette figures drawn from literary sources such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone With the Wind subvert the clichés and stereotypes of literary plantation life through their violent, satiric, and erotic postures. Viewing Faulkner’s work with slavery through the lens of Walker’s disturbing figure ensembles opens new ways of seeing Faulkner’s silhouette strategies in passages that feature racial, sexual, and erotic power. Faulkner’s methods function similarly to Walker’s silhouettes where several bodies blend into one black shape where body parts, individual identities, and racial distinctions are subsumed. The effect for both Faulkner and Walker is a kind of turbulence that is not unlike melodrama in its dredging up of contradictory and vibrant affectivities.