The Tenth Faulkner Studies in the UK Colloquium
The Time Has Come: William Faulkner, James Baldwin, and American Modernity

May 1st and 2nd, 2027
Online via Zoom

With keynote addresses by

Professor Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman
(author of Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture [2024])

and

Professor Douglas Field
(author of Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father, and Me [2024])

“I respect Faulkner enough to be saddened by his pronouncements on the race question, to be offended by the soupy rhetoric of his Nobel Prize speech, and to resent—for his sake—the critical obtuseness which accepted (from the man who wrote Light in August) such indefensibly muddy work as Intruder in the Dust or Requiem for a Nun.”

– James Baldwin, “As Much Truth as One Can Bear” (1962)

Despite owning a copy of Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), William Faulkner does not appear to have ever publicly acknowledged the work of James Baldwin. Baldwin, however, responded to Faulkner’s troubling “pronouncements on the race question” – specifically that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) should “go slow” in their pursuit of civil rights for African Americans – numerous times throughout his career. Most notably, in “Faulkner and Desegregation” (1956), Baldwin excoriated Faulkner, writing that “After more than two hundred years in slavery and ninety years of quasi-freedom, it is hard to think very highly of William Faulkner’s advice to ‘go slow.’” As Tyler Williams (2015) contends, Faulkner became, for Baldwin, not simply a person but a type: a structure of socio-political perception and historical delay. This conference takes this encounter as its point of departure, examining what emerges when Faulkner and Baldwin are read together not simply as writers of the American experience, but as competing interpreters of race, history, modernity, violence, religion, and American identity.

The conference invites 20-minute papers on any topic related to Faulkner and/or Baldwin. We particularly welcome papers that complicate, challenge, or rethink the apparent opposition between Faulkner and Baldwin, including but not limited to:

– Comparative approaches, including biographical comparisons and contrasts

– Questions of form, genre, and literary modernism

– Aspects of the “race question” in the United States, including civil rights, (de)segregation, Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Panther Party

– The spectre of religion in Faulkner and Baldwin’s life and work, including Calvinism, Pentecostalism, and the Gospels

– Gender, sexuality, masculinity, femininity, and depictions of women in Faulkner and Baldwin’s work

– The ambiguities of Southern life, culture, and politics for Faulkner and Baldwin

– Faulkner and Baldwin as dramatists and screenwriters on Broadway and in Hollywood

– Faulkner, Baldwin, and cinematic adaptation: new readings of, for example, The Story of Temple Drake (1933), The Sound and the Fury (2014), and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)

– Metropolitanism in the life and work of Faulkner and Baldwin: London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, and Istanbul

– Faulkner and Baldwin as public intellectuals, essayists, and speech writers

– Faulkner, Baldwin, and their readers, including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Tennessee Williams, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Maya Angelou, and Jesmyn Ward.

Please submit a c. 250-word proposal to the event organiser, Dr. Ahmed Honeini, at ahmed.honeini@rhul.ac.uk by March 1st, 2027. Successful applicants will be informed of their acceptance by March 5th, 2027.

The Faulkner Studies in the UK Research Network is dedicated to soliciting papers from scholars who reflect the diversity of the field in terms of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, institutional affiliation, and locality. We aim to include a mix of participants from across the career spectrum (from under- and postgraduate students to full professors).

All are welcome to apply. Follow us on Twitter: @Faulkner_UK.