Abstract
This essay performs a reading of William Faulkner’s <em>Absalom, Absalom!</em> by way of Hortense Spillers. Tracking Spillers’ analysis of Faulkner through various essays in the collection <em>Black, White, and in Color</em>, I pose a question of how the imaginary figure of the tragic ‘mulatto/a’ functions within the narrative repetition of the plantation romance. This question is oriented by Christina Sharpe’s <em>Monstrous Intimacies</em> in exploring how the spectacularized violence of the scene of the plantation is both obscured and re-presented in the construction of ‘post-slavery’ subjects. Using Faulkner, Spillers elaborates the role of language as a key link between psychic and social reproduction: as the mythic patriarch writes a narrative in the blood of his descendants, so too do the civilization-founding crimes of incest and miscegenation echo in cultural memory. The figure of the mulatto/a, or in a more contemporary environment the ‘mixed-race’ person, thus presents a certain problem or site of anxiety for white subjectivity, recalling and repressing the inaugural violence of the age of the plantation.
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