Tag Archives: Black blood

Black Blood Annotated Bibliography

Posted on by
1

Plenty has been written about Faulkner, race, how his characters are created, so it was not too difficult to find articles, mostly through CUNY+, Zotero [first time user!], Project Muse, Jstor, our Yonknapedia page for the sources used in the blood/miscegenation/racism entries, and google scholar. What was a bit difficult was finding [mostly] articles that were either specific to my topic or considering how its main points fit my central idea. I found it more challenging to find books that I could appropriately use as sources; I thought about considering some that focused on race, but I struggled to find a strong enough connection between my proposal and other Faulkner works such as Soldier’s Pay.  I wonder if I may have been too specific in my search. Overall, the process was not daunting and I’m grateful for the zotero site Prof. Allred built because it lead to some thought-provoking articles.

Works Cited:

  • Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage, 1936.
    An analysis of Henry’s anxiety with blackness and Sutpen’s seeming lack of anxiety and how both respond to Charles Bon’s lineage. I am fascinated with where and how this knowledge is revealed or hidden, and where it is used as a tool for power or destruction.
  • Entzminger, Betina. “Passing as Miscegenation: Whiteness and Homoeroticism in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!.” Faulkner Journal 22.1/2 (2007): 90.

In depth study of the Southern taboo of mixing blood [hemophobia] as well as the anxiety that it caused in society. This essay considers the parallels of “passing” [for white] with miscegenation and homoeroticism. Although my paper won’t focus on the homoeroticism of AA, it will focus on why Faulkner’s characters strived for clear and strict social and racial boundaries, as well as great anxiety blurring of these boundaries or lack of boundaries created within the characters.

 

  • Ladd, Barbara. “‘The Direction of the Howling’: Nationalism and the Color Line in Absalom, Absalom!” American Literature, vol. 66, no. 3, 1994, pp. 525–551., www.jstor.org/stable/2927603.

Ladd explores the octoroon identity as both a collage of others and an uncertainty of belonging. I want to use this article to explore how the structure of the  Yoknapatawpha cultural identity included race as well as how ‘the other’ [such as Black] was both embedded into it and threatened by it.

 

  • Masami Sugimori.“Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity in Absalom, Absalom!”  The Faulkner Journal. Mar. 1, 2008. P 3-22

This essay explores the correlation of Blackness and Whiteness and how they are perceived and why it matters in Yoknapatawpha County. The trouble with these perspectives is the ambiguity of Bon – where he fits in and how his mind is “limited and trapped by a body.”

 

  • Kartiganer, Donald. “The Blackness of Absalom, Absalom!” Faulkner and Mystery. Trefzer, Annette, and Ann J. Abadie, eds. JACKSON: U of Mississippi, 2014. 19-48. Web.

This article focuses on the language the four narrators use to describe, speak about, and grapple with Black. Based on their perspectives, we get subtle to very different responses and they all demonstrate some of that cultural anxiety of blurred boundaries, mixing labels, or a disregard for labels and borders.

  • Puxan-Oliva, Marta. “A Mysterious Heart: ‘Passing’ and the Narrative Enigma in Faulkner’s ‘Light in August’ and ‘Absalom, Absalom!”.” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 58, no. 1, 2013, pp. 51–78. www.jstor.org/stable/43485859.

This article focuses on a “narrative enigma of the characters who are able to pass for White, and because that narrative enigma is not resolved and it remains unclear if the characters passing, need to do so or if it is just paranoia.  Faulkner focuses more so on the fear that white Southerners have towards characters who can pass, than the actual passing.

 

  • Snead, James A. “Light in August and the Rhetorics of Racial Division.” Faulkner and Race: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha (1986): 152-169. Print.

This chapter focuses on the fracturing that a society imposes on itself because of the rigid divisions and racial rhetoric it creates and upholds. As stated, “The futility of applying these strictly binary categories to human affairs is the main lesson in Faulkner’s novels” is demonstrated with characters such as Charles Bon, Joe Christmas, and to an extent, Thomas Sutpen.

 

  • Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes.” “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Ed. Gates. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.1-20. Print.

This essay also focuses on author’s rhetoric on race and how it transforms characters and the world they inhabit. I am not entirely sure if I will use this source, however, I want to give myself a few more days to read it again and make a decision.

Black Blood Rumors

Posted on by
1

For my final paper, I would like to explore the concept of speaking calumny into existence through the use of the “one drop” rule regarding Black ancestry.

Speaking aloud the perception that someone could be Black becomes a fact [they must be Black because it was a thought and so they are] which then becomes that character’s doom. In the case of Joe Christmas [LIA] and Charles Bon [AA], their fates are doomed when someone whispers “black blood.” Joe Christmas’s ancestral lineage remained a mystery throughout most of his life and yet, when someone whispered or shouted about Joe’s potential black blood, Joe was a pariah and was either removed or he fled to a new unknown. In AA, Sutpen confronts the arrival of Charles Bon at his Hundred by revealing to his son Henry Bon’s paternal lineage – Sutpen was his father [from a previous marriage which, Sutpen walked out on upon discovering that his wife also had negro blood] and thus, Charles was unfit to be betrothed to Judith -their – sister. Potential incest, though jarring, had a solution – keep the lovers apart. However, when Sutpen later reveals that Bon has black blood, the disgust and betrayal proves too much for Henry, who kills Bon right in front of his sister-bride at the gates to Sutpen’s Hundred.

There is great but damning power in revealing if someone has “black blood,” however, there were times in Joe Christmas’s life in which he took that damning power and made it his whenever he chose to reveal that possibility about his lineage. He would use it as a taunt, such as when he taunted his adopted father with the possibility that he [McEachern] had raised, clothed, and fed a negro. To the people, such as McEachern who were suddenly faced with the calumnity of association to “black blood,” it would mean to be tainted.