Familial Places in Jim Crow Spaces: Kinship, Demography, and the Color Line in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County

Johannes Burgers

doi:10.22148/001c.14112

Abstract

Hosted out of the University of Virginia, Digital Yoknapatawpha is an international collaboration between scholars of William Faulkner and technologists at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. The project team has encoded all the locations, characters, and events in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha fictions into a relational database that powers an open-access web-portal. Users can avail of an atlas of “deep-maps,” data visualizations, archival material, and aural and visual resources to explore, teach, and research his works. Using techniques common in ecology and demography, this paper leverages the data to investigate the relationship between race, kinship, and space. It concludes, tentatively, that the social world of Yoknapatawpha is far more rigidly bounded along racial lines than current scholarship suggests. In particular, most interactions between characters from different races happen in a familial context, and are the result of racialized labor exploitation or outright enslavement of African-American families by Anglo-Americans. The lack of interactions outside of this context underscores just how little agency non-white characters have in Faulkner’s fiction.

Highlights

Hosted out of the University of Virginia, Digital Yoknapatawpha is an international collaboration between scholars of William Faulkner and technologists at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
Most interactions between characters from different races happen in a familial context, and are the result of racialized labor exploitation or outright enslavement of African-American families by AngloAmericans
In the summer of 2019, the Digital Yoknapatawpha (DY) project quietly passed a resounding milestone: after eight years of laborious coding, all of the Yoknapatawpha fictions had been entered into the database

Summary

Conclusions to New Beginnings

It is difficult to reconcile these insights with scholarship on race and Faulkner. Scholars generally accept that Faulkner’s upbringing and the pressures of smalltown Oxford limited the range of opinions he could publicly express about segregation, while acknowledging that he had a spotty record of making reactionary comments about race when afforded the opportunity. When Faulkner writes about race, it is more often about the anxieties of whiteness, and not the humanity of African-Americans This harsh conclusion is necessarily imperfect, and relies on reading the aggregated social world as more representative than a few select scenes. The character patterns available through the DY database should, not be misconstrued as the collection of hopes, desires, and feelings of the people of Yoknapatawpha, but rather as the grains of sand that sediment Faulkner’s native soil. Viewed from this perspective, character analysis at scale creates a special version of the sorites paradox. With phase II of the project, we will introduce keywords for events, which, hopefully, makes Faulkner’s world just a little more knowable too

For a good overview of recent work that has been done see

Findings

22 Sanctuary