Southern Carnivalesque: Laughter and the Performance of the Politics of Race in Fiction, 1885-2010

Using a range of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century texts to track the peculiar failures and ambiguous successes of white-authored black characters, the study defines southern carnivalesque\u27s problematic relationship with forms of black laughter and popular media images. The project demarcates southern carnivalesque\u27s development in relationship to cultural indices, and finds William Faulkner at the center of the aesthetic that creates so much controversy. Staging performances of blacknes that function between Mark Twain\u27s and Ralph Ellison\u27s, Faulkner shifts the paradigm of Southern humor, as Mardi Gras inspired his shift. Acrid laughter from Faulkner\u27s black characters acts as a disruptive sound of blackness asserting an identity resistant to cultural domination -- just as King Zulu\u27s laughter. I expose Mardi Gras\u27 influence on Faulkner, which reconfigures his works as southern carnivalesque, circum-Atlantic performances that forget nothing. The argument asserts that southern literature uses southern carnivalesque as a means to couple the comic with crises. The coupling presents a spectacle that returns a grotesque reflection of cultural ideologies that haunt readers with memories of regional traumas. In short, my new interpretation of Faulkner\u27s works as a Mardi Gras masquerade forms the center of my argument, and it mediates between the history of African American humor and white writers.The illumination highlights the culturally transformative force of black laughter and its troubled literary relationship to the South\u27s missed opportunties to achieve American ideals of equality