'From Disposability to Recycling': William Faulkner and the New Politics of Re-writing in Jesmyn Ward’s 'Salvage the Bones'

This essay argues that Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) engages in a form of rewriting (of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying [1930]) that cannot be described in terms of existing models of parody, revision, and “writing back to the center” most often associated with feminism and/or postcolonialism and/or postmodernism. Rather, it capitalizes on the status of the canonical text—which is always already associated with longevity and durability—in order to assert the resistance of one particular African American family to neoliberal discourses that would consign them to the category of “waste” (Giroux 187). In so doing, Ward thus moves towards a new, more politicized model of rewriting that can more accurately be called “recycling,” a term with connotations of more resolute social engagement and looking outward and forward as opposed to the potentially solipsistic and retrospective textual worlds with which rewriting tends to be concerned. The recycling of Faulkner’s novel in Salvage the Bones, through its combined social and textual emphases, provides a means of revivifying revisionary fiction as a literary-political enterprise

“History Repeating Itself: Passing, Pudd’nhead Wilson and The President’s Daughter”

Post print version deposited in accordance with SHERPA RoMEO guidelines. Copyright © 2009, Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters Vol.32(3) pp 809-821. Reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press

'Beautiful White Girlhood'? Daisy Buchanan in Nella Larsen's 'Passing'

ArticleThis article expands recent scholarship on race in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and intertextuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing by arguing that the latter is a “blackened” version of Gatsby. Mapping the genealogy of Passing, from Gatsby through Larsen’s first published work of fiction, “The Wrong Man” (1926), it proposes that Larsen’s allusions to Fitzgerald’s novel work to destabilize radically any secure sense of Daisy Buchanan’s whiteness by linking her quite emphatically with Clare Kendry. By reading Passing in this way, the article also reveals the extent to which Larsen built covert engagements with reading, writing and authorship into a text thematically preoccupied with looking, seeing and interpreting

Fictions of law and custom: passing narratives at the fins des siècles

This dissertation examines narratives of passing of the nineteenth- and twentieth century fins de siècle. My central thesis is that passing narratives of the 1990s and beyond evidence symmetry between the tropes of passing that occur at plot level and passing strategies surrounding the production of the texts themselves. I argue that the connections between passing and authorship that emerge in contemporary stories invite us to reconsider extant interpretations of earlier passing stories, specifically those published at the turn of the twentieth century. The Introduction challenges the historiography of the passing narrative traced in existing studies of passing. It also suggests the ways in which authorship and passing are inextricably linked via the arbitrary standard of "authenticity," both authorial and racial. In Chapter One, I examine the relationship between the African American body-as-text and the African American author who produces a text in The Bondwoman's Narrative (date unknown), Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000) and Percival Everett's Erasure (2001). Chapter Two takes the self-reflexive detective genre and traces the changing roles of the passing character within the conventions of the form, from femme fatale to hard-boiled detective. Here, I focus specifically on Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter (1901-1902), Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) and Robert Skinner's Wesley Farrell series (1997-2002). In Chapter Three, I examine texts whose protagonists' gender and/or racial ambiguity serve to destabilise analogously the religious categories under interrogation in those texts, namely Hopkins's Winona (1902) and Louise Erdrich's Tracks (1988) and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001). Chapter Four examines tropes of passing in relation to three contemporary novels of adolescence, Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle (1996), Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998) and Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex (2002). Finally, the Conclusion discusses recent controversies of authorship and authenticity in the U.S., particularly as these pertain to the ambiguous literary category of "memoir.

Fictions of law and custom: passing narratives at the fins des siècles

This dissertation examines narratives of passing of the nineteenth- and twentieth century fins de siècle. My central thesis is that passing narratives of the 1990s and beyond evidence symmetry between the tropes of passing that occur at plot level and passing strategies surrounding the production of the texts themselves. I argue that the connections between passing and authorship that emerge in contemporary stories invite us to reconsider extant interpretations of earlier passing stories, specifically those published at the turn of the twentieth century. The Introduction challenges the historiography of the passing narrative traced in existing studies of passing. It also suggests the ways in which authorship and passing are inextricably linked via the arbitrary standard of "authenticity," both authorial and racial. In Chapter One, I examine the relationship between the African American body-as-text and the African American author who produces a text in The Bondwoman's Narrative (date unknown), Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000) and Percival Everett's Erasure (2001). Chapter Two takes the self-reflexive detective genre and traces the changing roles of the passing character within the conventions of the form, from femme fatale to hard-boiled detective. Here, I focus specifically on Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter (1901-1902), Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) and Robert Skinner's Wesley Farrell series (1997-2002). In Chapter Three, I examine texts whose protagonists' gender and/or racial ambiguity serve to destabilise analogously the religious categories under interrogation in those texts, namely Hopkins's Winona (1902) and Louise Erdrich's Tracks (1988) and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001). Chapter Four examines tropes of passing in relation to three contemporary novels of adolescence, Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle (1996), Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998) and Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex (2002). Finally, the Conclusion discusses recent controversies of authorship and authenticity in the U.S., particularly as these pertain to the ambiguous literary category of "memoir.

"Pen and Ink and Page": The "American Letter" in Irish Atlantic Literature

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