THE ECHOES OF STRANGE FRUIT: RACIAL TERROR, ASSAULTIVE SPEECH, AND THE GRAMMAR OF WHITENESS IN WILLIAM FAULKNER’S “DRY SEPTEMBER” AND EUDORA WELTY’S “WHERE IS THE VOICE COMING FROM?”
Özet
This chapter intends to focus on two canonical Southern short stories. One of them is William Faulkner’s “Dry September” (1931) and the other is Eudora Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” (1963), which it reads as a single, transhistorical account of racial terror. This text, which blends Critical Race Theory with the historiography of lynching, contends that both short stories dramatise the same fundamental grammar: an empty accusation, the mobilisation of white womanhood, the defence of whiteness as a form of property, and the transformation of individual conscience into collective violence. While Faulkner intends to tell the lynching through a faceless crowd and a silenced victim, Welty transmits the story via the murderer as the first-person narrator. When read together, these two short stories expose the lynching not as a mere aberration but rather as an ordinary, ritualised technology of racial control. As this chapter suggests, the logic of this technology echoes through the twenty-first century’s social lynchings.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Keywords: Critical Race Theory, lynching, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, assaultive speech, whiteness as property
Konu Alanı: Sosyal Bilimler -> Dilbilim ve Dil -> Dünya Dilleri ve Edebiyatları
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Edman, T. B. & Oral, Y. (2026). THE ECHOES OF STRANGE FRUIT: RACIAL TERROR, ASSAULTIVE SPEECH, AND THE GRAMMAR OF WHITENESS IN WILLIAM FAULKNER’S “DRY SEPTEMBER” AND EUDORA WELTY’S “WHERE IS THE VOICE COMING FROM?”. In TÜFEKÇİ CAN, D. (Ed.), World Literatures: Literary Concepts and Critical Contexts (pp. -). Vizetek Yayıncılık. https://doi.org/10.54637/vizetek.9786253823696
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