Ev’ry Shut Eye Ain’ Sleep: A Critical Race Awakening of Flannery O’Connor’s Artificial and Converged Characters in Crisis

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Since the 1980s when the late Harvard Professor Derrick Bell, Mami Matsuda, Charles Lawrence, Kimberlé Crenshaw Williams, and Alan David Freeman conceptualized CRT in the discipline of law, there have been hundreds of thousands of publications applying the thought to disciplines beyond law. This analysis does not approach the toxic headlines and political attacks launched by former President Trump’s September 24, 2020 Executive Order defunding federal contractors who provide training on diversity and the 1619 Project. Literary scholars using this lens are fewer in number, but growing and gaining influence. Those shaping a literary discourse include Richard L. Schur, Ruth Hill, and Elizabeth; Marshall.

² See O’Donnell, cited elsewhere in this essay.

³ In summer 2020, the administration at Loyola University in Maryland, operated by the Catholic Church, voted to un-name a dormitory bearing the name Flannery O’Connor. As of this writing, the controversy grows about how an article by Paul Elie led to the school’s decision and subsequent debates and moves to cancel O’Connor’s legacy. Delgado is leading the challenge against the cancellation measures.

⁴ See also a more accessible article titled “Noted Author Plans to Lecture at SSC” in microfilmed copies of the Savannah News-Press, Sunday, April 16, 1961, p. 3A.

⁵ Gullah Geechee refers to enslaved Blacks and their descendants with West African roots who were bound and traded in areas 35 miles inland of the Atlantic coast. The area that encompassed this creolized culture, now defined as the Gullah-Geechee Heritage Corridor, runs from St. John’s River in Florida to Cape Fear in North Carolina. The author’s heritage stems from her roots in Charleston County (Parker’s Ferry) and Jasper County (Bellinger Hill) in South Carolina where she learned many such expressions.