The Flood Last Time: ‘Muck’ and the uses of history in Kara Walker’s ‘Rumination’ on Katrina

Kara Walker describes her book After the Deluge (2007) as “rumination” on Hurricane Katrina structured in the form of a “visual essay.” The book combines Walker's own artwork and the works of other artists into “a narrative of fluid symbols” in which the overarching analogy of “murky, toxic waters” holds the potential to “become the amniotic fluid of a potentially new and difficult birth.” This essay considers Walker's use of history within this collection of images to show how the book opens up ways to interrogate Katrina's particular significance as a wholly new, and yet eerily familiar, historical “event.” Nuancing a reading of Walker's book with reference to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), to which After the Deluge implicitly alludes, the essay examines Walker's artistic challenge to the notion that history is a narratable account of a past that precedes the present and demonstrates how that challenge encourages us to think about the potential uses of history within civil rights discourse after Katrina

Panel. Other Faulkners

Nothing Has Been Resolved: Mimesis and the Modern Dance Interpretations of As I Lay Dying / Michael P. Bibler, Manchester UniversityThis presentation introduces and discusses two important dramatic interpretations of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: Jean-Louis Barrault’s avant-garde French production Autour d’une Mère (1935) and Valerie Bettis’s U.S. modern dance production As I Lay Dying (1949). Given the obvious emphasis on bodily expression, these interpretations raise interesting questions about the novel’s use of language and the difficulty (even impossibility) of mimetic representation. Yet my purpose here is not just to show how these dances help illustrate or illuminate Faulkner’s work. Rather, I’m more interested in exploring how these three works help decenter Faulkner’s place in the modernist canon by placing greater attention on questions of performance, intertextuality, and collaboration—questions already raised by the multi-vocal form of the novel itself. Toward a Camp Appreciation of Faulkner’s Sanctuary / Ben Robbins, Freie Universität BerlinI would like to argue that both Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary (1932) and the film treatments he made of the novel for MGM in the early 1930s can be read with a camp sensibility, since they possess many aesthetic hallmarks of camp, including heightened stylization, theatricality, amorality, exaggeration, failed seriousness, and a predilection towards artifice. I am particularly interested in exploring those moments where the novel particularly, to quote Susan Sontag in her landmark essay from 1964, ‘Notes on Camp’, “proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken seriously because it is ‘too much.’” I will show how a camp reading of Sanctuary can help us understand how the novel disturbs the high/low axes by which we judge the Faulknerian canon. William Faulkner and a Family Who Influenced Him / Sally Wolff-King, Emory UniversityWilliam Faulkner’s celebrated heroine of The Sound and the Fury, Caddy Compson, may have had a real-life antecedent. That is a theory mentioned in Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an Antebellum Plantation Diary. More evidence to support that argument has come to light since the publication of Ledgers of History, however, and research indicates that a cousin of the McCarroll/Francisco/Leak family could be that person. The McCarroll/Francisco/Leak family of Holly Springs and Salem, Mississippi, came into focus recently when it became clear that they inherited and preserved a nineteenth-century plantation diary, in their possession for several generations. What Faulkner discovered in the diary of long ago informed his fiction in myriad ways, including plot, characterization, theme, and detail. Leak/McCarroll/Francisco family stories, however, also seem to have found their way into plotlines of The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished. That Faulkner drew from the real life around him has been well known since his lifetime, but the case seems stronger than ever that members of this particular family, whom he knew well and visited often, may have been—in ways not previously recognized—sources for some of Faulkner’s most famous novels

Same-Sex Intimacy in Fiction about Southern Plantations

Speaking on June 25, 2009 at Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse in Atlanta, Georgia, Michael Bibler discusses same-sex relationships in twentieth century literature about southern plantations—the subject of his book Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936–1968. He considers the ways in which same-sex character couples offer these authors vehicles to explore modes of equality in the intensely hierachial plantation structure