Review: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2018: Faulkner and Slavery
Review: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2018: Faulkner and Slavery, University of Mississippi, 22-26 July 2018 “What did slavery mean in the life, ancestry, environment, imagination, and career of William Faulkner?” This was the guiding question posed by the Call for Papers of this year’s annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, centered on the theme “Faulkner and Slavery,” and held at the University of Mississippi. As more work is undertaken across the globe to re-contextualize historical monuments, and to recover subjugated narratives, critical re-evaluations of the past are central to current scholarship; the time to critically re-assess Faulkner’s relationship to slavery is now. While on the surface, Faulkner’s own interaction with “the peculiar institution” might appear somewhat secondhand – the author was born in 1897, thirty-two years after the Emancipation Proclamation – the specter of slavery was never far from his life. Through his African American “Mammy”, Caroline Barr (born an enslaved person somewhere […]