Contested Identities: Racial Indeterminacy and Law in the American Novel, 1900-1942

In Contested Identities, I chart the path of the legal and literary discourses on racial identity, codified by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision and culturally ascendant in the early decades of the twentieth century. In this period, a group of American writers produced fiction that implicitly challenged this legal and cultural discourse. My project explores the literary productions of Charles W. Chesnutt, Nella Larsen, and William Faulkner—three writers who undermine, question, and critique the legal and social practices that seek to define and contain individual identities in binary terms. Specifically, in Contested Identities I explore why Chesnutt, Larsen, and Faulkner create characters whose identities are not clearly articulated, defined, or knowable, and why they intentionally position these figures in relation to the law. At the center of each of these texts there remains a void where racial information might be clearly articulated, defined, or corroborated, but isn’t. This enables Chesnutt, Larsen, and Faulkner to underscore an unresolved tension between what must be true and what cannot be known, a dynamic which throws into relief the maddening complexity of human experience in opposition to cut-and-dry legal and popular definitions of “race,” which operate under the assumption that blood proportions are easily known, and that specific blood proportions determine identity. I argue that it is racial indeterminacy that animates these writers’ explorations of identity, and that it is the fundamental theme that binds these characters and texts together. The law treats race as a matter of identity; my dissertation argues that the law is instead a crucial factor in the formation of the racial identity of individual characters

Panel. Space, Place, and Race: Geography and Genealogy in Faulkner\u27s Yoknapatawpha

The Family Turn: Sartoris and the Network-Place of Family / Taylor Hagood, Florida Atlantic University What Sutpen Discovered in New Orleans : Marriage and Plaçage in Absalom, Absalom! / Jennie J. Joiner, Keuka CollegeFaulkner\u27s Future Americans / Rebecca S. Nisetich, University of Southern Main

Panel. Comparatively Queer: Sexuality, Identity, and Experimentation in Faulkner and Beyond

Ugly Spirits, Ugly Desires, and the “Routine”: Queerness, the Unsightly, and Visibility in Faulkner’s Sanctuary and Burroughs’ Queer / Bernard T. Joy Containing Subversive Gender Identities in Halldor Laxness’s Salka Valk and Faulkner’s Sanctuary / Jenna Grace Sciuto, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts Gender and Sexuality in William Faulkner’s Light in August and Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on The Miracles at Little No Horse / Rebecca Nisetich, University of Southern Main

Panel. Sexual Properties

Percival Brownlee and the McCaslin Ledgers / James B. Carothers, University of Kansas“[The] anomaly calling itself Percival Brownlee” first appears in the McCaslin ledgers of Go Down, Moses in March, 1856 when Buck McCaslin notes his purchase of the slave “26yr Old.Cleark @ Bookepper. Bought from N.B. Forest at Cold Water 3 Mar 1856 $265. Dolars” This begins the cryptic account of Buck and Buddy McCaslin’s argument about what to do with “the anomaly.” Brownlee, hired as clerk and bookkeeper, can write his own name, but he cannot read, cannot plough, and cannot lead livestock to the creek to drink except one at a time. Buddy McCaslin immediately judges Brownlee worthless as a slave and urges his twin brother to “get shut of him” but Buck persists in seeking to get his money’s worth out of Brownlee until the latter figures in a livestock disaster: “1 Oct 56 Mule Josephine Broke Leg @ shot Wrong stall wrong niger wrong everything$100 dolars.” The next day Buck frees Brownlee and debits himself the $265, and the following day Buddy adds the$100 value of the mule Josephine to his brother’s debit. This part of the Brownlee narrative ends with Buddy explaining to Buck that their father L. Q.C. McCaslin would have renamed Brownlee “Spintrius.”The “Spintrius” identification of Brownlee and both early and later descriptions of him support the Digital Yoknapatawpha analysis that Brownlee is “repeatedly figured as effeminate.” This aspect of Brownlee’s role in Go Down, Moses has been interpreted in a number of ways. This paper considers the possible interpretations of both Buddy’s consistent disparagement of Percival Brownlee’s profound lack of masculine skills, as well as Buck’s stubborn resistance to his brother’s homophobic disdain for Brownlee, until Josephine’s “Broke Leg” convinces him that Buddy is right. Here and elsewhere in the novlel, Ike McCaslin meditates on both the ostensibly-comic matter of Percival Brownlee and the contrasting matter of his grandfather’s miscegenation and incest, with their tragic consequences for both free McCaslins and their slaves, of whatever myriad ancestry.“Something akin to freedom”: Patterns of Subjection and Resistance in Harriet Jacobs and William Faulkner / Jenna Grace Sciuto, Massachusetts College of Liberal ArtsHarriet Jacobs, a black woman born a slave, inhabits an oppositional social position to William Faulkner, a male descendant of the plantocracy. Jacobs’s nineteenth-century narrative is based on her own life in the antebellum South, while Faulkner’s novels are fictional reconstructions from the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, both writers depict the sexual subjections institutionalized by slavery, as well as challenges to these common dynamics. The textual subversions of Jacobs’s narrative operate simultaneously on the level of form and content, as is revealed through an analysis of her representations of plantation sexuality and her own experiences challenging her master’s control over her body. Reading Faulkner’s work alongside Jacobs’s brings to the fore the southern modernist’s own depictions of resistance. Using examples from his novels, such as defiant individuals and consensual interracial relationships, I argue that Faulkner’s work confronts, rather than passively reinscribes, the patterns of subjection and abuse ubiquitous in earlier eras.The Expropriated Voice: Absalom, Absalom!, Sound Recording, and Enslavement / Julie Napolin, The New SchoolIn Western traditions descended from Plato, the voice is taken to be a form of “property.” The voice cannot be taken from me and is defined as my inmost, intimate self. Faulkner understood that, like the flesh, the voice is a “citadel of the central I-Am\u27s private own.” If, for Faulkner, touch cuts across these fleshly boundaries and privacies, there is already something transgressive and paradoxical about the voice\u27s movement: it must leave me, “touch” the ear of the other, and yet retain its quality as “mine.” This paper argues that, written in the age of voice’s technological reproducibility, Absalom’s mode of narrative voice is premised upon this fragile paradox, expanding it and exerting pressure upon it to near shattering. But what were the limits of Faulkner’s critique of personhood and ownership? Is there something of the novel, as a form, that is premised upon liberal property, personhood, and the voice as belonging?The Slave Cabin as a Liminal Space in Light in August / Rebecca Starr NisetichThis paper explores the imaginative uses of the structure of the slave cabin in Light in August. As I will demonstrate, the Burden plantation’s decrepit slave cabin is both a liminal and a queer space. In Requiem for a Nun, Faulkner famously proclaimed that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In this paper, I show how the build environment of slavery provides fruitful grounds for identity formation and contestation in Faulkner’s oeuvre. In Light in August, the slave cabin is a space where nonconformity can be concealed from the curious eyes of Jeffersonians: it is where Joe Christmas lives as “husbands” with Joe Brown, and it is where the unmarried Lena Grove delivers her baby. A close reading of slavery’s built environment enables us to better understand its peculiar history and legacy in the U.S., as well as its continued ramifications and narrative utility.Response / Erich Nunn, Auburn Universit