Article: The Hidden Caribbean "Other" in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!: An Ideological Ancestry of U.S. Imperialism.(Critical Essay)

AFRICAN BLOOD IN THE GUISE OF A SEDUCTIVE HAITIAN CREOLE seethes to the surface of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! in a Civil War era showdown between father and son, master and slave, colonizer and colony. In this ancestral conflict, nothing less is at stake along with Thomas Sutpen's plantation than the South, the American myth of individuality and freedom, and its imperialist designs. America as empire is the foundation of this 1936 novel, though references to colonialism are minimal. The West Indies, and Haiti in particular, is marginally depicted and interpreted in the novel, both as foreign land of conquest and financial foundation of Sutpen's Hundred. Applying ...