Panel. Spaces of Slavery

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

23-7-2018 11:00 AM

Description

  • Ritual Architectures: Doorless and Makeshift Boundaries in Faulkner’s Slave Quarters / Amy Foley, Bryant University
    Faulkner builds raced architectures throughout his writings, associating a lack of ornamentation in slave dwellings with an unfinished, nascent, or uncultivated way of life. Particularly in Go Down, Moses; Absalom, Absalom!; and “Red Leaves,” slaves live in cabins entirely without doors or with doors of a makeshift design as do the “domiciled” slaves of Thomas Sutpen and the McCaslins. Faulkner’s slave quarters are built from “odds and ends” and “refuse” that adorn sites of entry, repeatedly suggesting that the value of making a home is in the ritual or performance rather than in its material application. Faulkner conceptualizes how architectures direct, facilitate, and possibly “arrest” the motion of enslaved bodies relevant to contemporary theories of architecture and space, economy, labor models, and modes of observation and movement in industrial era work culture. His slave architectures anticipate and work out alternative models of supervision and relations between master and slave.
  • Master/Slave Cartography: Mapping in The Unvanquished / Leigh Ann Litwiller Berte, Spring Hill College
    This paper examines Faulkner’s understanding of cartography as expressed in scenes within The Unvanquished (1938), a collection revised and published shortly after the author appended the first map of Yoknapatawpha to Absalom, Absalom!. In two key scenes, master and slave take turns as map makers, constructing “living maps” and what I call “trickster maps,” offering insight into the ways that maps and map making function as reflections of power and tools of subversion. Ultimately, these mapping scenes illuminate Faulkner’s larger conception of geography, unsettling our understandings of Yoknaptawpha as a geographical and imaginative entity. Faulkner offers a fluid understanding of the way that cartographers, land, events, and inhabitants intersect to construct contested, living maps of the world.

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Jul 23rd, 11:00 AM

Panel. Spaces of Slavery

Nutt Auditorium

  • Ritual Architectures: Doorless and Makeshift Boundaries in Faulkner’s Slave Quarters / Amy Foley, Bryant University
    Faulkner builds raced architectures throughout his writings, associating a lack of ornamentation in slave dwellings with an unfinished, nascent, or uncultivated way of life. Particularly in Go Down, Moses; Absalom, Absalom!; and “Red Leaves,” slaves live in cabins entirely without doors or with doors of a makeshift design as do the “domiciled” slaves of Thomas Sutpen and the McCaslins. Faulkner’s slave quarters are built from “odds and ends” and “refuse” that adorn sites of entry, repeatedly suggesting that the value of making a home is in the ritual or performance rather than in its material application. Faulkner conceptualizes how architectures direct, facilitate, and possibly “arrest” the motion of enslaved bodies relevant to contemporary theories of architecture and space, economy, labor models, and modes of observation and movement in industrial era work culture. His slave architectures anticipate and work out alternative models of supervision and relations between master and slave.
  • Master/Slave Cartography: Mapping in The Unvanquished / Leigh Ann Litwiller Berte, Spring Hill College
    This paper examines Faulkner’s understanding of cartography as expressed in scenes within The Unvanquished (1938), a collection revised and published shortly after the author appended the first map of Yoknapatawpha to Absalom, Absalom!. In two key scenes, master and slave take turns as map makers, constructing “living maps” and what I call “trickster maps,” offering insight into the ways that maps and map making function as reflections of power and tools of subversion. Ultimately, these mapping scenes illuminate Faulkner’s larger conception of geography, unsettling our understandings of Yoknaptawpha as a geographical and imaginative entity. Faulkner offers a fluid understanding of the way that cartographers, land, events, and inhabitants intersect to construct contested, living maps of the world.