Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction From Faulkner to Morrison [Paperback]

White southern writers are frequently associated with the racism of blackface minstrelsy in their representations of African American characters, however, this book makes visible the ways in which southern novelists repeatedly imagine their white characters as in some sense fundamentally black.White Face, Black Culture Artificial Niggers, White Homelessness, and Diaspora Consciousness William Faulkner, Whiteface, and Black Identity Flannery O'Connor, (G)race, and Colored Identity John Barth, Blackface, and Invisible Identity Dorothy Allison, Nigger Trash and Miscegenated Identity African American Fiction and the Limits of Whiteface

Duvall is renowned as a critic of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, and these two writers inform the conceptual framework of Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction...[This is] an often provocative but always engaging book. - Journal of American Studies

Duvall's readers, who have received good instruction in the uses of minstrelsy and white face (conscious and unconscious) in a variety of texts, will be on the lookout for the trope in other Southern writing. Those who teach about that writing will find that Duvall has strengthened their arsenal. - Joseph M. Flora, Mississippi Quarterly

I applaud Duvall's careful positioning of his terms throughout his study and its apparatus and find that it opens a well-considered space for discussion of the relationships of whiteness, blackness, and their relative visible and cultural forms...Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction: From Faulkner to Morrison primes one for the possibility of more recombinatory work on race, race changes, and the dismantling of whiteness. - Contemporary Literature

Duvall's study is an ambitious one, able to cover a great deal of conceptual ground with an admirable economy of expression...lucid and compelling, an essential volume for scholars of the American South, critical race theory, and tlSÁ