Panel. Faulkner, Chesnutt, Ward, Beyoncé

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

25-7-2018 11:00 AM

Description

  • A Parasitic Genealogy of ‘Slavery’s Capitalism’ in Chesnutt and Faulkner / Stephanie Rountree, University of North Georgia
    I engage a comparative study of Charles Chesnutt’s “Lonesome Ben” (1900) and William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) to examine how these texts’ figurations of hookworm in impoverished characters signal a genealogy of corporeal capitalist exploitation. Proceeding chronologically, Chesnutt’s dual settings before and after Emancipation illustrate a continuity of capitalist U.S. governance as it first enslaved Africans Americans and, later, extended to also subordinate poor white people during and beyond Reconstruction. To Chesnutt, the abjection of poor people—both black and white—evidenced how U.S. governance subordinated human life to capital. Faulkner’s Lena Grove invites application of this cross-racial critique, as she represents one of the poor, barefoot “hookwormridden heirs” of an abandoned mill town. I demonstrate how hookworm’s pathology offers a productive metaphor for the parasitic, ever-consuming, embodied history of capitalism—a genealogy that was born in slavery and proliferated beyond Emancipation to exploit U.S. subjects across racial difference.
  • Absalom’s Daughters: The Afterlives of Slavery in Beyoncé’s Lemonade / Kim Manganelli, Clemson University
    Remixing the signifiers and images of the plantation archive, Beyoncé’s Lemonade resurrects the silent, barely visible enslaved women whose physical and sexual labor made plantations like Sutpen’s Hundred possible but who are relegated to the shadows in Absalom, Absalom! Whereas non-white women were “made of by and for darkness” in Faulkner’s novel, in Lemonade these silent specters, whom we might think of as Absalom’s daughters, become a dynamic presence, giving life to an archive that has not always included the voices and stories of black women. Rather than burning to the ground the plantation and the history of commodification and sexual and physical violence that it embodies as Sutpen’s mixed-race daughter, Clytie, does at the end of Faulkner’s novel, Beyoncé remixes the archive and rebuilds the plantation in her own image, giving viewers a new way to understand the afterlives of slavery on River Road.
  • Emancipating Faulkner: Reading Go Down, Moses and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, UnBuried, Sing / Sherita L. Johnson, University of Southern Mississippi
    Enslaved African Americans and their descendants live in the webbed narrative of William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942). However, the author’s representation of the enslaved—-and the “curse” of slavery that their descendants bear—-is filtered through the consciousness of another white southerner, Issac McCaslin, and this “master narrative” of slavery does not allow black characters to escape their tragic fates. To offer a counter narrative of the enslaved and generational curses, I read Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) as a lyrical key to Faulkner’s novel. The aesthetics of the enslaved—spirituals and blues traditions, for instance—appear as evidence of the “cultural legacies of slavery” in both novels and, yet, Ward’s narrative allows us to travel from Mississippi’s Gulf Coast to the Delta (and perhaps other routes out of Yoknapatawpha), ultimately, to emancipate Faulkner from that slave past.

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Jul 25th, 11:00 AM

Panel. Faulkner, Chesnutt, Ward, Beyoncé

Nutt Auditorium

  • A Parasitic Genealogy of ‘Slavery’s Capitalism’ in Chesnutt and Faulkner / Stephanie Rountree, University of North Georgia
    I engage a comparative study of Charles Chesnutt’s “Lonesome Ben” (1900) and William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) to examine how these texts’ figurations of hookworm in impoverished characters signal a genealogy of corporeal capitalist exploitation. Proceeding chronologically, Chesnutt’s dual settings before and after Emancipation illustrate a continuity of capitalist U.S. governance as it first enslaved Africans Americans and, later, extended to also subordinate poor white people during and beyond Reconstruction. To Chesnutt, the abjection of poor people—both black and white—evidenced how U.S. governance subordinated human life to capital. Faulkner’s Lena Grove invites application of this cross-racial critique, as she represents one of the poor, barefoot “hookwormridden heirs” of an abandoned mill town. I demonstrate how hookworm’s pathology offers a productive metaphor for the parasitic, ever-consuming, embodied history of capitalism—a genealogy that was born in slavery and proliferated beyond Emancipation to exploit U.S. subjects across racial difference.
  • Absalom’s Daughters: The Afterlives of Slavery in Beyoncé’s Lemonade / Kim Manganelli, Clemson University
    Remixing the signifiers and images of the plantation archive, Beyoncé’s Lemonade resurrects the silent, barely visible enslaved women whose physical and sexual labor made plantations like Sutpen’s Hundred possible but who are relegated to the shadows in Absalom, Absalom! Whereas non-white women were “made of by and for darkness” in Faulkner’s novel, in Lemonade these silent specters, whom we might think of as Absalom’s daughters, become a dynamic presence, giving life to an archive that has not always included the voices and stories of black women. Rather than burning to the ground the plantation and the history of commodification and sexual and physical violence that it embodies as Sutpen’s mixed-race daughter, Clytie, does at the end of Faulkner’s novel, Beyoncé remixes the archive and rebuilds the plantation in her own image, giving viewers a new way to understand the afterlives of slavery on River Road.
  • Emancipating Faulkner: Reading Go Down, Moses and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, UnBuried, Sing / Sherita L. Johnson, University of Southern Mississippi
    Enslaved African Americans and their descendants live in the webbed narrative of William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942). However, the author’s representation of the enslaved—-and the “curse” of slavery that their descendants bear—-is filtered through the consciousness of another white southerner, Issac McCaslin, and this “master narrative” of slavery does not allow black characters to escape their tragic fates. To offer a counter narrative of the enslaved and generational curses, I read Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) as a lyrical key to Faulkner’s novel. The aesthetics of the enslaved—spirituals and blues traditions, for instance—appear as evidence of the “cultural legacies of slavery” in both novels and, yet, Ward’s narrative allows us to travel from Mississippi’s Gulf Coast to the Delta (and perhaps other routes out of Yoknapatawpha), ultimately, to emancipate Faulkner from that slave past.