Passable: Black Feminism, Working-Class Activism, and Reproductive Labor in Mid-Century American Writing

Passable is an examination of Black and leftist women\u27s writing at mid-century that attends to how certain women writers—Alice Childress, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Meridel Le Sueur, and Anne Moody—strategized feminized covers for radical identities and messages in their writing and lives. Leaning heavily upon the word passable for its simultaneous meanings of mobility and mediocrity, Passable traces apparently unremarkable writing for its circulatory capacities. Examining how working-class women\u27s everyday discourse has functioned as a site of Black Liberationist and feminist subversion, Passable analyzes texts that have been overlooked because of their attachment to women\u27s and domestic work—realms of solidarity and discourse that have been wrongly regarded as politically acquiescent and intellectually inferior. As analysis of writing activity that holds a tenuous relationship with the academic discipline of literary studies, Passable examines the historical contexts of the Cold War U.S. that contoured the professionalization of literary studies and, in turn, the metrics we still adopt to assess and describe literary work. Due to these implicit politics, literature as a field remains incapable of properly interpreting radical Black feminist writers and those they inspired

Panel. Faulkner and Morrison

Food, and Wellmeant : Representations of the Meal in Faulkner and Morrison / Meredith Kelling, University of Missouri, St. Louis Reading Faulkner Otherwise : Toni Morrison\u27s A Mercy and Faulkner\u27s Absalom, Absalom! / Doreen Fowler, University of Kansas Problematizing Literary Depictions of American Post-Colonialism: (Re)Reading The New White Man in Toni Morrison\u27s A Mercy and William Faulkner\u27s Absalom, Absalom! / Maia Butler, University of Louisiana, Lafayett

Panel. Moonshine and Magnolias: A History of Spirits in Faulkner\u27s Mississippi

Booze and Borderlands: Historicizing Race and Class in the Liminal Spaces of Light in August and Sanctuary / Carrie Helms Tippen, Texas Christian UniversityThe production, distribution, and consumption of illicit alcohol creates borderlands where the binary categories of race and class are destabilized. Rather than a history of alcohol alone, this presentation is a history of spaces: the forces that generated the demand for spaces, the persons and groups that met in such spaces, and the consequences of those meetings. I use this historic narrative to reinterpret the liminal spaces liquor creates in Faulkner’s works. In Light in August, the diner/brothel is a public space for conducting private acts. As a “white-only” space, the diner/brothel demands that Joe Christmas be assigned a discernable racial identity. Conversely, the Old Frenchman’s Place in Sanctuary is a private space turned public, merging Ruby Lamar’s home life with Lee Goodwin’s business. Ruby’s dining table and the porch, particularly, are borderlands where class status seems to lose some of its potency.The Noble Experiment? Faulkner\u27s Two Prohibitions / Conor Picken, Bellarmine UniversityFaulkner’s Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun use the historical bookends of Prohibition and the Sobriety Movement to interrogate the South’s troubling reaction to social change. Both novels feature Temple Drake and Gowan Stevens, and the manner in which they consume across these texts ties them to the historical climate of Prohibition and the emerging culture of sobriety/recovery in its wake. Sanctuary features Temple and Gowan descending into of alcoholism, while Requiem for a Nun shows them struggling with recovery from it. Temple and Gowan’s troubled experiences with alcoholism pressure notions that historicized representations of drinking reflect the progressive intents of what I call Faulkner’s two Prohibitions We Thought It Was Whiskey : Prohibition in the Jim Crow South and Faulkner\u27s Image of the Intemperate Negro / Meredith Kelling, University of Missouri, St. LouisProhibition in the South ought to be viewed as a movement not to inspire temperate behavior in all of its citizens—for the alcoholic behavior of established whites was famously overlooked—but to color-code the consumption of alcohol, to further an image of the African American slave descendant as a body in need of policing. In Faulkner’s oeuvre, that body belongs to Nancy Mannigoe. This paper will examine how varied perceptions of Nancy, in both 1931’s “That Evening Sun” and 1951’s Requiem for a Nun, problematize the stereotypical image of the intemperate Negro both by allowing for black subjectivity and by revealing the sanctioned paternalistic impulse to criminalize black behavior more generally. This paper provides a historical context for Nancy’s victimization, madness, and crime, that is, of Prohibition in the Jim Crow South, which sought to maintain slavery’s socioeconomic status quo by perpetuating an image of inherent black criminality