Aesthetic Radicals: White Violence as Exclusion in William Faulkner’s US South and Guðbergur Bergsson’s Iceland

Abstract: Exploring the work of US Southern writer William Faulkner alongside Icelandic novelist Guðbergur Bergsson reveals much about each region’s history and the complexity of colonial dynamics. The narrator of Bergsson’s Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller (1966), Tómas Jónsson, invents a surreal episode during the US Occupation of Iceland in WWII, building from the historical agreement that no Black soldiers would be stationed on the island to the government-sanctioned murder of a mixed-race baby. I relate this vignette to the scenes of lynching in Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and the corresponding forms of toxic Whiteness and racial fanaticism revealed. Arising from different historical contexts, these examples of racial violence and exclusion to the point of nonexistence demonstrate the devastating and self-annihilating effects of Whiteness, exposing anti-Black, paternalistic, and patriarchal underpinnings to the social, political, and economic systems in Iceland and the US.