Racialized Rituals of Death in William Faulkner's Novels

This thesis examines how ritual functions as a sustaining grammar of racial domination in the U.S. South, as depicted in three novels by William Faulkner. It argues that Faulkner’s representations of death rituals – the spectacle of lynching, the paternalist hunting ceremony, or the discursive reanimation of black bodies – encode the ideological mechanisms by which white supremacy perpetuates itself. In Faulkner’s Light in August (1932), Go Down, Moses (1942), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), rituals emerge not merely as cultural performances but as technologies of racial power that naturalize subjection, transforms death into governance, and convert black life into nonbeing.

The thesis develops an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that draws on Louis Althusser’s concept of ideological ritual, Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, Abdul R. JanMohamed’s dialectic of death, Orlando Patterson’s notion of social death, and Valérie Loichot’s theorization of the unritual. Together, these theoretical approaches illuminate how Faulkner’s narratives materialize racial power through bodily discipline, ontological reduction, and epistemic violence.

Chapter One reads Light in August as a meditation on lynching as a ritual of ideological interpellation and necropower. The chapter argues that Joe Christmas’s death ritualizes the racialized management of life and death, transforming violence into a public ceremony of interpellation, surveillance, and bodily annihilation. Chapter Two turns to Go Down, Moses to explore how the plantation’s logic of mastery is refashioned into a paternalist ritual of domestication. The chapter demonstrates that in the novel’s hunting scenes, what appears an idealized vision of black-white relations in fact reenacts the mechanisms of social death, foreclosing the possibility of black emancipation. Chapter Three examines Absalom, Absalom! as the culmination of Faulkner’s meditation on ritual. Here, the logic of ritual collapses into its inversion: the unritual. Through the repeated narration of Charles Bon’s suicide, the novel translates corporeal violence into epistemic desecration: Bon’s murder becomes an act of discursive zombification that denies him both agency and posthumous autonomy.

By tracing this trajectory from ritual to unritual – from the corporeal spectacle of lynching to the spectral narration of black death – the thesis argues that Faulkner’s fiction reveals the persistence of racial domination through the ritualization of death. Ultimately, Racialized Rituals of Death in William Faulkner’s Novels contends that Faulkner’s narratives expose the U.S. South’s necropolitical logic while also revealing its instability. In the repetition of ritual lies both domination and the faint possibility of its undoing. By reading Faulkner’s fiction through the interstices of ritual, death, and race, this thesis contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations in Faulkner studies, Southern studies, and the broader critical discourse concerning biopolitics, necropolitics, and the afterlives of slavery.