The Transpacific South: Biopolitics, Impersonality, and Faulkner's Early New Orleans Fiction

ABSTRACT

While the hemispheric turn in literary studies has reshaped the geographical study of William Faulkner, the transpacific dimension in his early fiction remains largely unmapped. Reading his 1920s New Orleans fiction against the biopolitics of the Exclusion era, this article reveals a narrative laboratory where racial forms and modernist aesthetics intersect. On the one hand, texts like “Yo Ho and Two Bottles of Rum” (1925) crystallize the era's biopolitical logic; here, an Orientalist erasure hollows out Chinese figures to construct a mirror for white colonial instability and anxiety. On the other hand, the unpublished manuscript “Peter” (c. 1925) experiments with an alternative framework: modernist impersonality. And yet, this detached gaze proves precarious, ultimately ruptured by the disruptive vitality of the unclassifiable Chinese‐Creole subject. Through the profound tension between Orientalist objectification and internal resilience, these narrative experiments complicate the era's racial discourses and disrupt the region's geographical insularity. Ultimately, these texts not only anticipate the human endurance central to Faulkner's later fiction but also map a transpacific South that extends far beyond established hemispheric boundaries.