{"id":44237,"date":"2015-11-26T19:58:50","date_gmt":"2015-11-26T19:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=44237"},"modified":"2015-11-28T00:06:18","modified_gmt":"2015-11-28T00:06:18","slug":"violent-disruptions-richard-wright-and-william-faulkners-racial-imaginations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=44237","title":{"rendered":"Violent Disruptions: Richard Wright and William Faulkner’s Racial Imaginations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Violent Disruptions: Richard Wright and William Faulkner’s Racial Imaginations<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Harvard University
\nSeptember 2013
\n177 pages<\/p>\n

Linda Doris Mariah Chavers<\/strong><\/p>\n

A dissertation presented to The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of<\/em> Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of African and African American Studies<\/em><\/p>\n

Violent Disruptions<\/em> contends that the works of Richard Wright<\/a> and William Faulkner<\/a> are mirror images of each other and that each illustrates American race relations in distinctly powerful and prescient ways. While Faulkner portrays race and American identity through sex\u00a0and its relationship to the imagination, Wright reveals a violent undercurrent beneath interracial encounters that the shared imagination triggers. Violent Disruptions argues that the spectacle of the interracial body anchors the cultural imaginations of our collective society and, as it embodies and symbolizes American slavery, drives the violent acts of individuals. Interracial productions motivate the narratives of Richard Wright and William Faulkner through a system of displacement of signs. Though these tropes maintain their currency today, they are borne out of cultural imaginings over two hundred years old. Working within the framework of the imaginary, Violent Disruptions<\/em> places these now historical texts into the twenty-first century\u2019s discourse of race and American identity.<\/p>\n

In the first part of the dissertation, I show in detail the various narratives at work in William Faulkner\u2019s Absalom, Absalom!<\/em><\/a> (1936) in order to portray the imaginations shared by the white characters and disrupted by the interracial body as spectacle. Richard Wright\u2019s Native Son<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(1940) depicts a similar racial imaginary but with more focus on its violent, corporeal effects. By contrast, in the second half of the dissertation, I demonstrate the writers\u2019 central and racially charged characters from their earlier works, Light in August<\/a><\/em> (1932) and Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin [Children]<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1938; 1940) and look at how the figures of Joe Christmas and Big Boy, respectively, work as literary prototypes for their version in later works.<\/p>\n

Read the entire dissertation here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Violent Disruptions: Richard Wright and William Faulkner’s Racial Imaginations Harvard University September 2013 177 pages Linda Doris Mariah Chavers A dissertation presented to The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of African and African American Studies Violent Disruptions contends […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[838,1196,8,20],"tags":[631,22046,558,490],"class_list":["post-44237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dissertations","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-harvard-university","tag-linda-doris-mariah-chavers","tag-richard-wright","tag-william-faulkner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44237"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44286,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44237\/revisions\/44286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}