Slave Capitalism in Faulkner

A central achievement of recent scholarship on capitalism has been the detailed case it makes for how extensively Atlantic capitalism relied on a global system of enslaved labor. Besides the direct profits European investors extracted from colonial agricultural enterprises, establishing dominance over the production, manufacturing, and trade in commodities like cotton, gains also came from instruments of financialization in speculative investment, credit banking, and insurance—developing industries that fed on slave capitalism. Faulkner’s chronicle of the plantation regime exposes its dependence on financialized forms of slave capitalism, however much its participants deny them.  The particulars of financialized slaveholding in Absalom, Absalom! retain legibility under their attempted expungement by not-narration.  After considering capitalist derangements of personhood and time in the novel, contributor John T. Matthews turns to how its aesthetic responds to slave capitalism’s infliction of such violence.  Faulkner’s fiction formalizes the distortions of slave capitalism, but he redeploys such distortion in narrative and stylistic forms that resist capitalism’s demands.