African American Folklore

Recent revisionist scholarship has argued that representations by white “outsider” observers of black American music have distorted historical truths about how the blues came to be. While these scholarly arguments have generated an interesting debate concerning how the music has been framed and disseminated, they have so far only told an American story, failing to acknowledge that in the post-war era the blues had spread far beyond the borders of the United States. As Christian O’Connell shows in Blues, How Do You Do? Paul Oliver’s largely neglected scholarship—and the unique transatlantic cultural context it provides—is vital to understanding the blues.


O’Connell’s study begins with Oliver’s scholarship in his early days in London as a writer for the British jazz press and goes on to examine Oliver’s encounters with visiting blues musicians, his State Department–supported field trip to the US in 1960, and the resulting photographs

and oral history he produced, including his epic “blues narrative,” The Story of the Blues (1969). Blues, How Do You Do? thus aims to move away from debates that have been confined within the limits of national borders—or relied on clichés of British bands popularizing American music in America—to explore how Oliver’s work demonstrates that the blues became a reified ideal, constructed in opposition to the forces of modernity.

In 2014 Gary Van Valen published a thought-provoking article in Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore an article titled “The Seven Trees and Ramapough Ethnicity.” In it he took issue with my interpretation of a so-called “Negro Charm” collected circa 1910 from seventy-five year old William De Freece in Ringwood, New Jersey, by Columbia University linguist John Dyneley Prince. Van Alen says that in a book titled Mythology of the Lenape: Guide and Texts published in 1995, folklorist John Bierhorst noted that what is known as the “Pleiades [seven stars] and Tree” motif was collected in the 1930s in Eastern Oklahoma by University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Frank C. Speck circa 1931 in his book on the Delaware Indian Big House Ceremony.

However, there is no contemporary evidence that the Lenape Indians practiced the Big House Ceremony when they lived in New Jersey. Bierhorst also says that the “Pleaides and Tree Motif” is found among other Native American tribes, including Cherokee, Iroquois, Wyandot, and thus may have been adopted by the Delaware Indians in their nineteenth-century migrations through New York State to Canada and through the Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley to Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska, and Wisconsin.

Van Valen goes beyond that to conclude that it is evidence that the present-day Ramapo Mountain People descend from Lenape Indians. But the fact that there may have been some cross-cultural syncretism between African and Native American cosmologies in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the ancestors of the Ramapo Mountain People lived in the Hackensack Valley and when the Lenape Indians still lived in colonial New Jersey does not prove that the present-day Ramapo Mountain People descend as a tribe from the Lenape Indians.

The use of Hurston’s essay by the Smithsonian Institution points to the exalted status that Hurston and her essay have now achieved. Once anthropologists began to take note of Hurston’s folklore collection Mules and Men certain adjustments were made in order to absorb Hurston’s writings into the discourse of anthropology. There has never been a systematic analysis of “The Characteristics of Negro Expression.” Hurston has been said to have been elusive. She is not at all elusive. The problem is that her readers are not equipped to read her work, because they have made a set of justifiable but nevertheless mistaken assumptions about what they are dealing with. Hurston’s essay “The Characteristics of Negro Expression” is not anthropology, it is esotericism.  The other texts that Hurston wrote as anthropology—Mules and Men and Tell My Horse are likewise coded, esoteric, and are completely devoid of authenticity as anthropological studies or collections of folklore.

This note is dedicated to the study of the motif of raven as a scavenging post-Flood scout and its "White Raven" version. In her monograph The Raven and the Carcass, Anna Birgi tta Rooth proposed that this motif was brought to all parts of the New World from Western Europe by Catholic missionaries. The article suggests that both "The Raven and the Carcass" motif and its "White Raven" version existed in the New World prior to the European colonization of Americas.

Following the lead oflRicardo Alegria, most scholars believe that the Fiestas de Santiago Ap6stol in Loiza, Puerto Rico, draw their strength from a syncretic mixture of Spanish mock battles between Moors and Christians, on the one hand, and imported Yorbi'b deities and masks, on the ...

ONE OF THE MORE intriguing and widespread characters in traditional Mexican danzas is that of La Malinche or, as she is sometimes known, La Maringuilla. She appears in dances as diverse and diffuse as Oaxaca's danza de la pluma ( Cohen 1993; Harris, in press), the Sierra de ...

Through an analysis of Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894) by Joel Chandler Harris and The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (1899) by Charles Chesnutt, this essay accounts for a late nineteenth-century genre termed the queer fantastic. In so doing, it suggests that in the late nineteenth century, the term queer, as a signifier of distorted time, became central to debates over race and the nature of folkloric belonging.

Américo Paredes was a prolific transdisciplinary scholar and an extraordinary humanitarian whose life's work focused on challenging, crossing, and bridging borders of various kinds. In this essay, I demonstrate that Paredes carved an incredibly fertile intellectual path that yielded copious theoretical insights and inspired new generations of scholars to pursue, and expand upon, his groundbreaking revisionist scholarship. Noting that his

This is the presentation of slides presented at the National Association of African-American Studies Conference, February 2016 in Baton Rouge, LA. The paper accompanying these slides is "Sylvia Plath's Hidden Civil Rights Issues", first presented in 2013 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Please download PPT presentation to read notes.

The article discusses the phenomenon of the “Black badman” in the context of Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained. A brief outline of the history of Black folktales provides the parameters for the rise of violent tales and tales of violent men, such as Railroad Bill or Stagolee. As an outlaw, Django represents a counterimage to the threat of Black violence that was used to justify not only the racist brutality of lynching, but also the establishment of law enforcement agencies in the American South. By alluding to the legend of Bras Coupé, Tarantino provides a historic lineage for Django, while his use of the “blaxploitation” aesthetic highlights the viability of the Black badman figure for a contemporary America. As a badman, Django is not simply a personification of resistance to White racial domination, but a veritable superhero for a future that one might be tempted to call “post-racial.”

This course will examine American expressive culture, including everyday speech, narrative, music, foodways, public celebrations, and material culture through an exploration of the multiple and changing avenues of diversity in the United States. Folklore can be considered the unofficial culture that exists beneath and between the institutions of power that we read about in our history books, and that is what we will be studying—the 99% of American life that goes unseen and unnoticed in other college courses. Some of the topics we will examine include occupational folklore, family stories, contemporary legends and fake news, folk and fairy tales, political humor, cryptozoology, bodylore, and the adaptation and commodification of folk culture in popular media.