Writing the Grotesque in Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones"

In her work, Jesmyn Ward has revitalized the Southern Gothic tradition and its tropes to better reflect the realities of Black American life in the 21st century. This essay explores the reconfiguration of the grotesque body in Ward's sophomore novel, Salvage the Bones, which follows an impoverished Black family in Mississippi in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. In contrast to her literary predecessors, Ward defines the grotesque as a state of debility imposed on Black bodies and then deemed uniquely problematic to them as a class and race, rather than the result of centuries of structural oppression. As such, she understands the trope as encompassing far more than bodily or intellectual difference, the way in which it was previously utilized by Southern writers like William Faulkner and Carson McCullers. Instead, Ward theorizes the grotesque as a biopolitical state, in which populations that do not conform to the status quo, and specifically the dominant capitalist mode of production and consumption, are driven to the margins and their lives deemed expendable.

New Southern Gothic

Investigating the demise of the writ of habeas corpus under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), this paper questions the callused lineage of cases upholding Title I of AEDPA and contends that states must take up a statutory method like Texas’s to review defendant’s claims of actual innocence to ensure that the legal system designed under the U.S. Constitution remains fair and just not only in theory, but in practice. Using imagery from the southern gothic genre, this paper also reveals that “the death belt” most adequately portrays the reality of the death penalty, as many appeals based on actual innocence originate from this area.

A Good Man is a Trickster to Find

In my presentation, I will demonstrate the contrast between the pioneer of the Southern Grotesque, Flannery O’Connor, and her famous story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” with Taylor’s use of the gothic in his YA novel. O’Connor adapted her version of the gothic from her predecessors such as Shelley and Poe. But she veers away from the creation of a fantastical monster tradition of the Romantics to drive the focus of the “monstrous” to the very human but harmful behaviors of her characters. Similarly, Taylor’s narrative does away with the over-the-top fantasy of the Romantic tradition and instead chooses to set the narrative in a realistic space with relevant characters. The difference between O’Connor and Taylor is that in O’Connor’s Southern Gothic the setting is the pinnacle of her story while Taylor’s Indigeneity shines through with his humor, traditional storytelling, and orality in his narrative. Differences aside, it is clear that the motive of each text is a call for social reform in O’Connor’s criticism of the social structure of the American South and in Taylor’s criticism of colonization.

As She Lay Dying: Locating the Gothic in Kaui Hart Hemmings’s The Descendants

This essay seeks to expand the scope of both US southern and Pacific Islander American studies by examining The Descendants (2007) in conversation with William Faulkner’s southern gothic mainstay As I Lay Dying (1930). The essay positions Hemmings’s novel in a gothic framework to reveal connections across regional gothics in the United States and expose colonial legacies. The enduring trauma of British imperialism is well-documented, but American colonialism, particularly in Hawai‘i, is rarely addressed in the continental United States, making a gothic “recontextualization” especially necessary. Both Hemmings and Faulkner interrogate the pressures the dead—both recent and ancestral—place on the living by deploying gothic tonality to illuminate social problems. In aligning gothic forms, this essay examines the literary representations of twenty-first-century plantation inheritances from the southernmost US state, Hawai‘i, and the southeastern United States. Ultimately, I argue that vestiges of the wrongs borne of their plantation origins, in both the southeastern United States and Hawai‘i, manifest across gothic forms in distress surrounding land and legacy as well as in an emphasis on futurity—all grounded in the maternal.

From Venus to “Black Venus”: Beyoncé’s I Have Three Hearts, Fashion, and the Limits of Visual Culture

In 2016, Lemonade was lauded as “Black girl magic” for the ways the hour-long HBO special (and subsequent album) celebrated Black women and the Southern gothic tradition. It also was the first hint of Beyoncé paying homage to West African Yoruba traditions. At the 2017 Grammys, her performance was both an invocation of the sacred in Western art history and further homage to Yoruba. The performance opened with poetry by Warsan Shire, and snapshots of her daughter, Blue Ivy, but the highlight was Beyoncé’s gold gown, and crown, and gold accessories, all of which symbolized the African goddess Osun. Released just before her Grammys performance, the I Have Three Hearts photo-series circulated as pregnancy images (she was pregnant with twins), but it also functioned as a repository of Beyoncé’s invocation of the sacred in Western culture, as embodied in Venus, and the African goddess, often labelled as “Black Venus.” This article is an examination of three images in the I Have Three Hearts series, taken by Awol Erizku, and the series’ accompanying poetry by Shire. I argue that it raises important questions about the role of visual culture in fashion and popular culture. Is Beyoncé the Venus of the twenty-first century? Does this photographic series remap Western visual culture to reimagine Black womanhood in the discourse on sexuality? Or, it is an example of pastiche in postmodern culture wherein truncated information is authorized, making everyone an expert without the demand for historical context?

O mito em William Faulkner: entre a defesa e a denúncia da tradição / The Myth in William Faulkner’s Works: Between the Defense and the Denouncement of the Tradition

Resumo: Este ensaio prioriza uma leitura da poética do escritor norte-americano William Faulkner (1897-1962) articulada a teorias culturais e filosóficas sobre o mito e busca compreender as relações que se estabelecem entre a estética faulkneriana e a (re)criação da tradição sulista, que pode ser interpretada como um discurso mítico. O artigo reflete sobre a relação do escritor com o mito sulista e sobre o tratamento literário que é conferido à temática em seus romances. A investigação proposta torna evidente que Faulkner se situa em uma encruzilhada existencial, bifurcada entre a defesa e a denúncia da tradição de sua terra natal. A (re)criação literária do universo mítico sulista permite, ao escritor, problematizar a narrativa mítica em que se converteu a tradição, questionando sobretudo suas limitações ideológicas. O esforço em narrar a crônica do Sul também é uma tentativa possível de reconstrução do sentido existencial de uma comunidade esfacelada pela Guerra de Secessão e pelas vertiginosas mudanças histórico-econômicas.Palavras-chave: William Faulkner; mito; tradição; gótico do Sul.Abstract: This essay proposes a reading of the poetics of William Faulkner, by linking it to cultural and philosophical theories about myth, and it intends to understand the established relations between Faulkner’s aesthetics and his creative review of the Southern tradition, read as a mythical discourse. This paper reflects about the relation between the writer and the Southern myth and it speculates about the literary handling consecrated to such theme in his novels. The research brings to light that Faulkner faces an existential forked crossroad that encourages him to defense and denouncement of his homeland tradition. The literary (re)creation of the Southern mythical universe allows the writer to problematize the mythical narrative the tradition evolved into and to question its ideological boundaries. The effort into narrating the Southern chronicle is also a possible attempt to rebuild the existential meaning of a community shattered by American Civil War and by vertiginous historical and economical changes.Keywords: William Faulkner; myth; tradition; Southern Gothic.