Acts of Looking in William Faulkner, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Edouard Glissant

Abstract: Following studies of intertextual entanglements in Southern US and Caribbean fiction, this article examines how a notion of looking shapes the connections across William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932), Edouard Glissant’s essay collection Sun of Consciousness (1956), and Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Work” from his poetry collection Magic City (1992). In these texts, an act of looking asserts the spatial and temporal co-presence of subjects previously separated by geographical and historical disjuncture, relating Indigenous, Black, migrant, and planter perspectives. The act also highlights the intertextual politics that shape the representation of race across these regions. Drawing on Glissant’s concept of poetic intention, I aim to show that an act of looking foregrounds a composite linguistic and historical milieu that informs what a writer can perceive of the racial landscapes of the Americas. By analyzing the conditions of visibility that shape literary subjectivities, I seek to unsettle intertextual politics that assume the singularity of a novel like Light in August and the theoretical gravity of Glissant.