Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: On Antiracism

One of the ways in which racism functions so efficiently and continuously is in its ability to obscure, deny, or ignore what majority culture appropriates and takes from minority cultures. That strategy often results in an accepted popular wisdom that minorities produce and create little of value and that they themselves are largely valueless. In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, scholars forged ahead with changing such perceptions and recognizing minority contributions; the more obvious recognitions were in terms of music and popular culture. But it is much different in literary studies. Critics generously observe how majority writers contribute to work of minority authors. Rarely is there a mention of the reverse. How often are students of literature reminded that Toni Morrison wrote her masters thesis on William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf? Yet are they routinely told of the white writers who found their inspiration in Morrison’s works? I attempted to forward the reverse discourse in “Lingering in the Black: Faulkner’s Illegible Modernist Sound Melding” by focusing on how William Faulkner early on found actual models and inspiration in the published works of Black writers and in the sounds those Black writers voiced in their characters and art. In that essay for the 2013 Faulkner conference on “Faulkner and the Black Literatures of America,” I also pointed to other modernist literary critics, such as Michael North, Laura Winkiel, and Aldon Lynn Nielsen, who have made important forays into explicating patterns of the reverse flow of materials from minority to majority writers. Typically they pursued the ways in which Black orality filtered into the work of white modernism writers, such as T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. While signaling the significance of these scholarly contributions in reading the relationship of white writers to Black voice and vernacular, I wanted especially to foreground that in his early writings Faulkner had entered an intersubjective space that involved published texts written by