In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon characters enter haunted houses seeking information only to be confronted on the stairs by mysterious African American women. This essay explores what is at stake in the portrayals of African American specters standing on staircases and impeding other characters’ desire for knowledge. The gothic energy driving the repetition is the conflation of person and property that happens in slavery, causing these women not just to haunt the houses but to haunt as houses, as the status of property they were assigned because of their race. While this status renders the women in one sense powerless, each uses her situation as property to assert a different kind of possession, thereby becoming powerful specters. As property, the women testify to the horror of slavery. As specters, the women reveal how that horror haunts the present.
{"title":"Specters on Staircases","authors":"S. Ford","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvs32r00.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvs32r00.7","url":null,"abstract":"In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon characters enter haunted houses seeking information only to be confronted on the stairs by mysterious African American women. This essay explores what is at stake in the portrayals of African American specters standing on staircases and impeding other characters’ desire for knowledge. The gothic energy driving the repetition is the conflation of person and property that happens in slavery, causing these women not just to haunt the houses but to haunt as houses, as the status of property they were assigned because of their race. While this status renders the women in one sense powerless, each uses her situation as property to assert a different kind of possession, thereby becoming powerful specters. As property, the women testify to the horror of slavery. As specters, the women reveal how that horror haunts the present.","PeriodicalId":120672,"journal":{"name":"New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130101630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter engages racial discourse by linking the concept of signifying to the men and women in “The Demonstrators” who represent the African American community. The interaction between the black characters in “The Demonstrators,” especially when individuals who do not bare a cultural kinship to them are present, possesses an ancestral link to the African heritage in which the community is inherently steeped. In a textual moment that appears anticlimactic, members of the African American community of Holden demonstrate resistance to the intrusion of dominant culture through use of the age-old concept of signifying.
{"title":"Demonstration of Life","authors":"E. Lumumba","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvs32r00.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvs32r00.13","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter engages racial discourse by linking the concept of signifying to the men and women in “The Demonstrators” who represent the African American community. The interaction between the black characters in “The Demonstrators,” especially when individuals who do not bare a cultural kinship to them are present, possesses an ancestral link to the African heritage in which the community is inherently steeped. In a textual moment that appears anticlimactic, members of the African American community of Holden demonstrate resistance to the intrusion of dominant culture through use of the age-old concept of signifying.","PeriodicalId":120672,"journal":{"name":"New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124226925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter proposes that Eudora Welty’s “Negro State Fair Parade” photographs of Jackson during the 1930s capture not only the segregated practices and spaces of the American South but also the transgressive rituals and transformative performances of an increasingly socially mobile black culture. These photographs, many of them never before published, display the tensions between cultural integration and racial segregation, and they speak sharply and sometimes humorously to the immediate political and economic contexts. Welty captures new African-American middle class opportunities in photographs that display long-standing black professions such as the burial and beauty parlor business, but also aspirations for upper middle-class vocations. Together these photos depict boisterous African American men and dignified women whose access to parade floats and cars indicates a new kind of racial and social mobility in the segregated southern cityscape. Welty creates a visual record of the act of claiming public space as she zooms in on various strategies of African American self-fashioning.
{"title":"Transformative Performances","authors":"A. Trefzer","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvs32r00.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvs32r00.5","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter proposes that Eudora Welty’s “Negro State Fair Parade” photographs of Jackson during the 1930s capture not only the segregated practices and spaces of the American South but also the transgressive rituals and transformative performances of an increasingly socially mobile black culture. These photographs, many of them never before published, display the tensions between cultural integration and racial segregation, and they speak sharply and sometimes humorously to the immediate political and economic contexts. Welty captures new African-American middle class opportunities in photographs that display long-standing black professions such as the burial and beauty parlor business, but also aspirations for upper middle-class vocations. Together these photos depict boisterous African American men and dignified women whose access to parade floats and cars indicates a new kind of racial and social mobility in the segregated southern cityscape. Welty creates a visual record of the act of claiming public space as she zooms in on various strategies of African American self-fashioning.","PeriodicalId":120672,"journal":{"name":"New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121761620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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