The 48th Faulkner Conference

 

The 48th Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, July 18-21, 2021

 

Unless they are planned with exceptional care, traditional ZOOM conferences often assault participants with tanks, dogs, and fire-hoses of  "political correctness."  This year's virtual Faulkner conference was planned  and executed with exceptional care.  The reason is not far to seek.

 

The theme ---"Faulkner, Welty, Wright: A Mississippi Confluence"---provided an opportunity to examine the spectrum of race in Mississippi  literary productions (including the conference itself as production and performance) without uttering the N-word that provokes fear, trembling, and linguistic/ psychological  guilt.  It is ironic, of course, that avoiding use of the N-word can magnify awareness that the word has been operative and continues to function in many sectors of American life.  One doesn't have to utter the word to know its location in America's powerful racial contract, to appreciate its implacable psychological damage for American citizens.  By addressing the confluence of Faulkner, Welty, and Wright, the conference enabled consciousness of how devastating is the black/white binary , devastating and obscenely delusive. The conference succeeded in effecting a temporary deconstruction of the binary that continues to infect literary commerce and the habits of American publishers in all streams.

 

Thus, all of the presenters and participants tackled matters of veillance, surveillance , and sousveillance by juxtaposing the world-class legacies of three Mississippi writers.  When the conference proceedings are published, people who did not have the pleasure of being in the circle of digital confluence will have opportunity to meditate on the necessity of severely minimizing binaries.  Unless we engage that process in good faith, we will be complicit and regressive.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            7/24/2021 11:29:31 AM

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