Wishlist: Joe Christmas and Black fungibility in Faulkner's "Light in August"

In Light in August, Joe Christmas is racially persecuted in the South during the Jim Crow era, facing both sexual and violent threats. In the afterlives of slavery in Faulkner’s fictional town of Jefferson, Black bodies remain objectified from the White community. Christmas, whose name references his inherent legibility, attempts to maintain his autonomy in the midst of severe prejudice in the Jim Crow era. While some White characters may be more sympathetic than others, all succeed in objectifying him, stripping the character of his independence. Through interrogating his race, and positing him as a figure of anti-whiteness, therefore Black, this paper analyzes the different methods that characters in the novel racialize Christmas and render him legible and transferrable through different institutional imagery. Their objectifications raise the questions: who is considered human, and why? Investigating these questions clarifies the endurance of the afterlives of slavery, as well as analyzing the function of representation(s) and how they impact characters. This paper analyzes the economic and sexual motives White characters embody, while detailing the impacts onto Joe’s character, and the overall implications of the post-Reconstruction South itself during a period of immense technological and economic change. Whiteness’ attempts to subject Blackness to violence depend on a Whiteness as insecure as it is porous.