11/20/2022 0 Comments Spectra at plantation![]() ![]() Looking at the narrative reconfigurations of the ‘mulatto/a’ to that of the ‘mixed race’ subject, what is at stake for the “post-” in “post-slavery subjectivities”? I begin with “Faulkner Adds Up”, tracking the strata of repetition from the intimate/readerly to the macro/national scales. My goal in this work is to bring together Spillers’ analyses of repetition and the figure of the mulatto/a, to see how their intersection generates a certain kind of temporality for post-slavery subjectivities. 5 It is thus, ironically, the fixation on the gothic, the old, and the dead, that causes me to find Faulkner’s texts as useful sites for thinking about modernity and the (im)possibility of a future after the scene of the plantation. In Monstrous Intimacies, Christina Sharpe follows Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection in exploring “the ongoing processes of subjectification during slavery and into post-slavery to which all post-modern subjects are made subject.” 4 Although “post-slavery subjectivity is largely borne by and readable on the (New World) black subject,” Spillers’ reading of Faulkner presents a valuable case study in how the construction of this black subject reflects the neurotic compulsions and anxieties of white writers and readers. Spillers’ own analysis of Faulkner, and the function of race as a signifier, seems especially timely as American popular culture proceeds into an ostensibly ‘post-race’ era. However, might this work to Faulkner’s (or us, his readers’) advantage? Might it be that Faulkner’s South, Spillers asks us, “is liberating the word of its truth and the truth of its word on the nation-ground?” 3 Both of us are quite like Quentin, poring meticulously over this seemingly arbitrary text, reaching for – for what? It seems, as Hortense Spillers says, that “one is never quite finished with Faulkner.” 1 Throughout the essays in her collection Black, White, and in Color, Spillers looks to Faulkner as “a writer who appears to see his country clearly and does not flinch.” 2 As she notes in “Faulkner Adds Up: Reading Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury,” Faulkner’s status as a “Southern writer” renders him as a relatively backwards provincial in the larger “New World” canon. So, in the act of re-reading Absalom, I find myself reading my younger self. Then 16, now 26, in the intervening years I have passed over the age of Quentin Compson during the events of Absalom and The Sound and the Fury, including his suicide. The figure of the mulatto/a, or in a more contemporary environment the ‘mixed-race’ person, thus presents a certain problem or site of anxiety for white subjectivity, recalling and repressing the inaugural violence of the age of the plantation.Īs Meta’s algorithms happily reminded me, this past month (March 2022) marked one decade since I first read William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, as a student at a boarding school in metro-Detroit. Using Faulkner, Spillers elaborates the role of language as a key link between psychic and social reproduction: as the mythic patriarch writes a narrative in the blood of his descendants, so too do the civilization-founding crimes of incest and miscegenation echo in cultural memory. This question is oriented by Christina Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies in exploring how the spectacularized violence of the scene of the plantation is both obscured and re-presented in the construction of ‘post-slavery’ subjects. ![]() Tracking Spillers’ analysis of Faulkner through various essays in the collection Black, White, and in Color, I pose a question of how the imaginary figure of the tragic ‘mulatto/a’ functions within the narrative repetition of the plantation romance. This essay performs a reading of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! by way of Hortense Spillers. ![]()
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