Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2013 ed. by Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr. (review)

Each year the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference collects selected papers presented at the conference into a single volume published by the University Press of Mississippi. The recently published 2013 collection features papers from the fortieth annual conference examining the role of William Faulkner’s work in connection with the literature of the black Americas. In a somewhat unusual move for the series, this volume includes both critical and creative interpretations of the conference theme. Seventeen essays and poetic selections examine issues of Faulkner’s influence on writing in black literatures of the Americas, influences on and reinterpretations of his own work, and the connections between Faulkner’s work and the literature and writers of the region. In his introduction to the volume, Jay Watson quotes a key line from Édouard Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi: “Faulkner’s oeuvre will be made complete when it is revisited and made vital by African Americans.” This goal, Glissant suggests, “will be achieved by a radically ‘other’ reading” (xxi). The artists and critics from the Caribbean and America contributing to the 2013 volume, as Watson notes, “reveal that the revisionary work Glissant describes has been long underway in the Americas. They return us to Faulkner with new insight not only into the magnitude and impact of his achievement but also—just as meaningfully—into its limits” (xxi–xxii).

Following the Introduction and “Note on the Conference,” the volume opens with “African American Poetic Responses to Faulkner” by Chiyuma Elliott, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Derrick Harriell, Randall Horton, and Jamaal May. At turns playful and poignant, these poetic interpretations of Faulkner’s life, texts, and characters invite readers to reimagine Faulkner’s life and his apocryphal world in exciting and enlightening ways. The critical essays that follow put Faulkner’s work in conversation with a variety of literary and cultural topics. James Smethurst examines the early African American migration narrative in Faulkner’s fiction, Thadious M. Davis evaluates Faulkner’s use of the black voice, George Hutchinson connects Faulkner’s career with the evolution of black modernism, and Tim A. Ryan outlines connections between Faulkner’s writings and the work of Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton.

In the first of several thematic pairings, Joe Fruscione examines Faulkner’s and Ralph Ellison’s reactions to intellectual celebrity and their shared experiences in President Eisenhower’s People-to-People program, while Ben Robbins examines transgressive sexualities in Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms” and James Baldwin’s Another Country. Lisa Hinrichsen examines how African American writers like Randall Kenan have dealt with the gothic nature pervading of much of Faulkner’s work, and Matthew Dischinger explores the importance of the narratives told by the plantation ledgers in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. Doreen Fowler uses Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! to illustrate the power of language with respect to race and the social construction of identity, and Ted Atkinson shows how Natasha Trethewey creatively reimagines Light in August in her powerful poem, “Miscegenation.”

The remaining essays largely connect Faulkner’s work to that of other writers. Andrew B. Leiter speaks to Jean Toomer’s influence on Faulkner, John Wharton Lowe examines Faulkner’s influence on Ernest J. Gaines, Dotty Dye reads Faulkner’s A Fable alongside Claude McKay’s Banjo, and T. Austin Graham juxtaposes Faulkner’s The Unvanquished with W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction with an eye toward their depictions of the Civil War. Jenna Sciuto and and Sharron Eve Sarthou read Faulkner comparatively against two writers of the black Caribbean; Sciuto reads Faulkner alongside Haitian writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Love, and Sarthou shows how Haitian American Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker critiques Faulkner’s depictions of Haiti in Absalom, Absalom!

I had the pleasure of attending the 2013 conference, so I heard many of these works read in...