ABSTRACT
The interplay between William Faulkner’s conceptualization of American identity and the presence of immigrants in his imaginings of the nation results in fictions not nearly as stark as Ellison’s in condemning immigrant incursions on American soil. Neither, however, are they as insouciant as Rushdie’s regarding the breakup of organic relations between geography, history, and race. Yet like these writers, Faulkner is attuned to the changes wrought by and upon local communities encountering new challenges to their static compositions. Faulkner’s work, particularly The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, registers the onset of American identity’s modern fragmentation and the related disruption of local spaces, both of which were brought about by increased migration and unprecedented forms of inter-national contact. Ellison responded to what he saw as more invidious versions of these phenomena years later with an integrated cultural defense. Rushdie, many decades later, emphasized similar elements as givens in a U.S.-dominated, globalized world, as he sought to add his voice to the American canon and new Americans to the (imagined) nation. Faulkner, conversely, was writing during a period when the U.S. South was struggling to respond to economic modernization, and the United States was trying to accommodate exceptional forms of immigration. In response, he sought to define and maintain the boundaries of his native region. His attempt, however, required him to reveal the impossibility of maintaining an internally homogenous vision of his U.S. South.
