PresentationTitle

Panel. Slavery and its Afterlives in Go Down, Moses: Traces and Testaments

Location

Yerby Auditorium

Start Date

25-7-2018 9:30 AM

Description

  • “If I Just Knowed What Hit Knows”: Excavating Slavery in “The Fire and the Hearth” / Laura Wilson, University of Mississippi
    When asked about the creation of Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner remarked that: “I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it […] It opened up a gold mine of other peoples” (“The Art of Fiction” 57). Based on the author’s evocative metaphor of prospecting for the hidden treasure contained in Southern soil, this paper aims to uncover how Faulkner uses Lucas Beauchamp’s hunt for buried coins in “The Fire and the Hearth” as a metaphor to excavate the pervasive scars of slavery, and critique the capitalist system of plantation labor. Focusing largely on the symbolism of the divining machine, I argue that Faulkner utilizes this treasure-seeking device to bury his deeper racial message under the raucous farce of the quest itself.
  • Singing in a Strange Land: Slavery and Scripture in Go Down, Moses and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem / Lael Gold, Productive Slumber
    Biblical intertextuality in Go Down, Moses and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem illuminates some subtle and excruciating aspects of slavery and its aftermath. Violent political, social and economic repression necessitated that slaves employ coded communication via song as well as other forms of subterfuge; psychological repression, on the other hand, is what led enslavers and their descendants to a different sort of subterfuge, the concealment of their own inculpatory activities, not from any external oppressor but from themselves. Faulkner appropriated from slave culture a strategy of biblically encoding what, because of the latter sort repression--i.e. his and the rest of white America’s denial of ancestral crimes--required indirect expression. In both novels, the evoked biblical intertext functions as a key for deciphering some of Faulkner’s insights into slavery, including indication of his seeming awareness of the inevitable race-based limitations of his own perspective and therefore of his own song.
  • Faulkner’s Last Will: Genealogy, Racial Allegory, and the Legal Fictions of Southern Paternity / Garry J. Bertholf and Zoran Kuzmanovich, Davidson College
    While literary critics as diverse as Du Bois, Hughes, and Baldwin all polemicized against Faulkner, many black writers were more magnanimous in their hermeneutic accounts of Mississippi’s only Nobel Prize-winning writer—Wright, Ellison, and Glissant to name a few. Today literary circles remain divided on Faulkner’s writings and public opinions on race relations in America. We propose a paper that examines this tension. A close reading of Faulkner’s 1954 “Last Will and Testament” reveals the names of two important and surprisingly undertheorized beneficiaries: “Payne Wilson” and “Lawrence Arenza McJunkin.” Our preliminary genealogical work with the United States Federal Census Collection and Public Records Index indicates that Wilson’s and McJunkin’s descendants are still living near, even on Faulkner’s Greenfield Farm—indeed, we will offer preliminary notes on our efforts to conduct an ethnographic study of the African-American families who still claim proprietary rights to the property Faulkner bestowed to them.

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Jul 25th, 9:30 AM

Panel. Slavery and its Afterlives in Go Down, Moses: Traces and Testaments

Yerby Auditorium

  • “If I Just Knowed What Hit Knows”: Excavating Slavery in “The Fire and the Hearth” / Laura Wilson, University of Mississippi
    When asked about the creation of Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner remarked that: “I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it […] It opened up a gold mine of other peoples” (“The Art of Fiction” 57). Based on the author’s evocative metaphor of prospecting for the hidden treasure contained in Southern soil, this paper aims to uncover how Faulkner uses Lucas Beauchamp’s hunt for buried coins in “The Fire and the Hearth” as a metaphor to excavate the pervasive scars of slavery, and critique the capitalist system of plantation labor. Focusing largely on the symbolism of the divining machine, I argue that Faulkner utilizes this treasure-seeking device to bury his deeper racial message under the raucous farce of the quest itself.
  • Singing in a Strange Land: Slavery and Scripture in Go Down, Moses and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem / Lael Gold, Productive Slumber
    Biblical intertextuality in Go Down, Moses and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem illuminates some subtle and excruciating aspects of slavery and its aftermath. Violent political, social and economic repression necessitated that slaves employ coded communication via song as well as other forms of subterfuge; psychological repression, on the other hand, is what led enslavers and their descendants to a different sort of subterfuge, the concealment of their own inculpatory activities, not from any external oppressor but from themselves. Faulkner appropriated from slave culture a strategy of biblically encoding what, because of the latter sort repression--i.e. his and the rest of white America’s denial of ancestral crimes--required indirect expression. In both novels, the evoked biblical intertext functions as a key for deciphering some of Faulkner’s insights into slavery, including indication of his seeming awareness of the inevitable race-based limitations of his own perspective and therefore of his own song.
  • Faulkner’s Last Will: Genealogy, Racial Allegory, and the Legal Fictions of Southern Paternity / Garry J. Bertholf and Zoran Kuzmanovich, Davidson College
    While literary critics as diverse as Du Bois, Hughes, and Baldwin all polemicized against Faulkner, many black writers were more magnanimous in their hermeneutic accounts of Mississippi’s only Nobel Prize-winning writer—Wright, Ellison, and Glissant to name a few. Today literary circles remain divided on Faulkner’s writings and public opinions on race relations in America. We propose a paper that examines this tension. A close reading of Faulkner’s 1954 “Last Will and Testament” reveals the names of two important and surprisingly undertheorized beneficiaries: “Payne Wilson” and “Lawrence Arenza McJunkin.” Our preliminary genealogical work with the United States Federal Census Collection and Public Records Index indicates that Wilson’s and McJunkin’s descendants are still living near, even on Faulkner’s Greenfield Farm—indeed, we will offer preliminary notes on our efforts to conduct an ethnographic study of the African-American families who still claim proprietary rights to the property Faulkner bestowed to them.