Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction: From Faulkner to Morrison

✍ Scribed by John N. Duvall

• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 215
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction explores a form of racial passing that has gone largely unnoticed. Duvall makes visible the means by which southern novelists repeatedly imagined their white characters as fundamentally black in some sense. Beginning with William Faulkner, Duvall traces a form of figurative and rhetorical masking in twentieth-century southern fiction that derives from whiteface minstrelsy. In the fiction of such subsequent writers as Flannery O'Connor, John Barth, Dorothy Allison, and Ishmael Reed, the reader sees characters who present a white face to the world, even as they unconsciously perform cultural blackness. These queer performances of race repeatedly reveal that being merely Caucasian is insufficient to claim Southern Whiteness.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgments......Page 8
Preface: White Face, Black Performance......Page 10
1 Artificial Negroes, White Homelessness, and Diaspora Consciousness......Page 22
2 William Faulkner, Whiteface, and Black Identity......Page 38
3 Flannery O’Connor, Grace, and Colored Identity......Page 84
4 John Barth, Blackface, and Invisible Identity......Page 114
5 Dorothy Allison, “Nigger Trash,” and Miscegenated Identity......Page 148
6 Black Writing and Whiteface......Page 166
Notes......Page 190
Works Cited......Page 202
C......Page 210
G......Page 211
M......Page 212
Q......Page 213
W......Page 214
Y......Page 215