Wai Chee Dimock, professor of English and American Studies at Yale, continues her analysis of Faulkner's Light in August by tracking the many uses of the word "nigger" as it attaches to Joe Christmas. She moves character by character: Joe Brown and the dietitian use the word under duress, Hightower and Bobbie use it lightly or evasively, Joanna Burden fuses it with her family's Calvinist theology, and Joe Christmas himself turns it ironic. Dimock treats these shifting usages as a way into the novel's central, unresolved problem, how racial identity gets made and remade through language rather than fixed by it. The lecture is part of Yale's Open Course on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, recorded in fall 2011, and carries a warning for the graphic language discussed. It rewards viewers already familiar with the novel's plot and characters.