“I have lived to make me what I choose to be”: Joe Christmas (Un)Raced in William Faulkner’s Light in August
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Is Joe Christmas, protagonist of William Faulkner’s 1932 Light in August, neither “black” nor “white,” or both “black” and “white”? Taking its cue from such a tricky question, this articles examines how Joe Christmas becomes an undecipherable sign of race in the South that lays bare both the black self-conscious experience of irreducible psychological, cultural division and the white’s delusion of psychological, cultural autonomy. His presence as a particular reference to miscegenation not only refuses a racial categorization that flattens him into a presence of one or the other color but also illustrates the ways in which blackness and whiteness identify themselves in terms of what they are not while potentially undermining themselves insofar as their identities depend on a relationship with the potentially confrontational other for their constitution. Viewed in this light, Joe Christmas is “raced” as all the racial anxieties and hysteria of the South are projected onto his body. Yet, he is also “unraced” by becoming a haunting trope of nothing that calls into question all the claims to a fixed and stable racial identity.
Abstract
Is Joe Christmas, protagonist of William Faulkner’s 1932 Light in August, neither “black” nor “white,” or both “black” and “white”? Taking its cue from such a tricky question, this articles examines how Joe Christmas becomes an undecipherable sign of race in the South that lays bare both the black self-conscious experience of irreducible psychological, cultural division and the white’s delusion of psychological, cultural autonomy. His presence as a particular reference to miscegenation not only refuses a racial categorization that flattens him into a presence of one or the other color but also illustrates the ways in which blackness and whiteness identify themselves in terms of what they are not while potentially undermining themselves insofar as their identities depend on a relationship with the potentially confrontational other for their constitution. Viewed in this light, Joe Christmas is “raced” as all the racial anxieties and hysteria of the South are projected onto his body. Yet, he is also “unraced” by becoming a haunting trope of nothing that calls into question all the claims to a fixed and stable racial identity.
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