Modernity’s Suffocations: Plantation Assemblages in Faulkner’s Miasmic South

abstract: William Faulkner’s characters gasp, pant, and suffocate in the enclosed spaces of Yoknapatawpha county. Reading instances of breathlessness and miasmic contamination in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses , this essay argues that Faulkner’s atmospherics simultaneously conceal and reveal the plantation’s continued hold on the modern South, while also correcting a posthumanism that obscures the role of race and racialization in material animacy. Faulkner’s imagined geographies thus articulate the suffocating effects of the plantation from the inauguration of this oppressive organizing structure into modernity—a modernity that includes the modernist text as a vehicle necessarily contaminated by the plantation’s crimes.