Panel Proposal: “Reckoning with Faulkner’s Civil Rights Legacy”

Organized by the William Faulkner Society

William Faulkner’s complicated and contradictory relationship with civil rights has sparked much debate in the field. Faulkner’s oeuvre, from his short stories, novels, screenwriting, essays, and speeches, provides countless examples of his criticism of white supremacy, southern race relations, slavery, and segregation. Yet, as the Civil Rights movement built momentum in the 1950s, Faulkner adopted a more regressive stance, often apologizing for the south’s opposition to integration. In his 1956 Life article, “Letter to a Northern Editor,” Faulkner condemns the “forces outside the South which would use legal or police compulsion” to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that “separate but equal” was illegal. Admitting that he does not “believe [integration by force] will work,” Faulkner begs civil rights activists and federal authorities to “‘Go slow now. Stop for a time, a moment.” Moreover, in his 1956 The Reporter interview with Russell Warren Howe, Faulkner speaks for Black Mississippians suggesting that he has known them “all my life. . . I know how they feel,” claiming that they think poorly of the Civil Rights Movement as “trouble.” Such moments reveal profound tensions within Faulkner’s racial politics and that his own imagination could not fully escape the limits of his historical moment.

In line with MLA 2027’s presidential theme “Emancipatory Narratives,” The William Faulkner Society (WFS) seeks submissions for a guaranteed session panel that investigates the relationship between William Faulkner and civil rights. The WFS invites papers about Faulkner (biography, politics, philosophy, relationships, etc.) and his oeuvre as they relate to themes, theories, and/or ethics of civil rights and racial equality.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Faulkner the public figure; the literary giant; the representative of the US South
• His evolving political identity
• His correspondence with other writers, leaders, intellectuals, activists, or politicians.
• Themes in his oeuvre, including:
  • Progressive sentiments, politics, stances, rhetoric, ethics.
  • Lost cause, pro-segregation, gradualist, or other regressive sentiments, stances, rhetoric, ethics.
  • Civil rights discourse.
  • Race relations, racial uplift, racial violence.
  • Interracial relationships, kinship, intimacy.
  • Representation, especially of Black people, agency, autonomy, and/or resistance.
  • Education, progress, regression.
  • Civil unrest, protest, organizing, placemaking.
  • Federal, state, and local politics or activism.
  • The role of law, policing, and/or (extra)legal violence.
  • Space, place, segregation.
  • Memory, nostalgia, historical revisionism.
• Teaching Faulkner’s complex legacy; teaching Faulkner in context of Civil Rights history.
• Ethical considerations for teaching, editing, publishing on, and/or curating Faulkner’s oeuvre.

Please send a 300-500 word abstract and a short bio (150 words max) to wfsociety@gmail.com by Saturday 28th March 2026.