Call for Papers    

Faulkner and Whiteness
Deadline: September 24, 2005

The Faulkner Journal

Guest Editor: Jay Watson, University of Mississippi

Faulkner lived and wrote at a time when models of normative and deviant identity were increasingly racialized, even as models of racial identity were increasingly biologized. This is one among many reasons why whiteness in Faulkner--and the whiteness of Faulkner--deserve our critical attention.
This special double issue of The Faulkner Journal welcomes submissions that problematize the ostensibly unremarkable phenomenon of whiteness in Faulkner’s life and career.  

Topics could include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

• perspectives on white masculinity and femininity; the role played by whiteness in delineating gender identity and vice versa

• intersections between Faulkner’s writings and contemporaneous discourses of whiteness, including eugenics, nativism, nationalism, colonialism, and Jim Crow

• new approaches to poor-white characterization in Faulkner: individuals, families, communities

• analyses of the material practices and privileges that confer whiteness in (or on) Faulkner

• how whiteness is interpreted, enforced, awarded, or withheld in or by Faulkner

• performances of whiteness that destabilize the color line

• comparisons between Faulkner’s works and other significant literary explorations of whiteness

• the whiteness of Faulkner himself, as performed (or misperformed) by the author and/or constructed by the academy

• materialist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, historicist, gender studies, performance studies, or critical race studies perspectives on whiteness as identity and/or ideology in Faulkner

• relations between whiteness and modernism; the whiteness of Faulkner’s modernism

• the economics, politics, ethics, poetics, psychology, spirituality, geography, or “queerness” of “trash” in Faulkner’s work

• “primal scenes” of whiteness in Faulkner’s novels and stories

• the retreat of blackness/hegemony of whiteness in late Faulkner

Deadline for submission is September 24, 2005 (Faulkner’s birthday).

Direct inquiries to Jay Watson at jwatson@olemiss.edu.

Please follow submission guidelines in the current issue of The Faulkner Journal;
send two copies of your manuscript to Jay Watson, c/o The Faulkner Journal,
Dept. of English, University of Central Florida, P. O. Box 161346, Orlando,
FL 32816-1346.