Rountree, Stephanie Manganelli, Kim Johnson, Sherita L.

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A Parasitic Genealogy of Slaverys Capitalism in Chesnutt and Faulkner / Stephanie Rountree, University of North GeorgiaI engage a comparative study of Charles Chesnutts Lonesome Ben (1900) and William Faulkners Light in August (1932) to examine how these texts figurations of hookworm in impoverished characters signal a genealogy of corporeal capitalist exploitation. Proceeding chronologically, Chesnutts dual settings before and after Emancipation illustrate a continuity of capitalist U.S. governance as it first enslaved Africans Americans and, later, extended to also subordinate poor white people during and beyond Reconstruction. To Chesnutt, the abjection of poor peopleboth black and whiteevidenced how U.S. governance subordinated human life to capital. Faulkners Lena Grove invites application of this cross-racial critique, as she represents one of the poor, barefoot hookwormridden heirs of an abandoned mill town. I demonstrate how hookworms pathology offers a productive metaphor for the parasitic, ever-consuming, embodied history of capitalisma genealogy that was born in slavery and proliferated beyond Emancipation to exploit U.S. subjects across racial difference.Absaloms Daughters: The Afterlives of Slavery in Beyoncs Lemonade / Kim Manganelli, Clemson UniversityRemixing the signifiers and images of the plantation archive, Beyoncs Lemonade resurrects the silent, barely visible enslaved women whose physical and sexual labor made plantations like Sutpens Hundred possible but who are relegated to the shadows in Absalom, Absalom! Whereas non-white women were made of by and for darkness in Faulkners novel, in Lemonade these silent specters, whom we might think of as Absaloms daughters, become a dynamic presence, giving life to an archive that...

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