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In this essay, I outline Anand Prahlad's existential critique of folklore studies while simultaneously considering the personal and professional inspiration Prahlad has ofered me. I highlight Anand Prahlad's profound influence in Folklore Studies, Disability Studies, and creative writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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I analyze two previously unknown fictional pieces written by the jazz musician Sidney Bechet, whose 1960 autobiography Treat It Gentle is considered to be one of the most literary books about jazz. Through my analysis of these archival discoveries, which reside among the Charles Delaunay Collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, I explore the narrative impulse of Bechet's artistic output and consider what it might mean to call Bechet a writer. He was an improviser who told stories in song, but he was also a musician who imagined his music as part of a broader artistic project—one that I will argue was intrinsically narrative, dramatic, and multimodal. Perhaps more importantly, these new works reveal the extent to which Bechet was committed to blending African American folklore, autobiography, and fiction in ways that put him in conversation with other Black modernist writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview is presented with African American author Cecil Brown. He discusses his various novels, including "Days Without Weather," "Coming Up Down Home," and "Stagolee Shot Billy," his childhood in North Carolina, and his interest in African American folklore.

The "Blues Narrative: Blues People, COVID-19, and Civil Unrest" focuses on African Americans born between 1945 and 2004. The article delves into the establishment of homes, lifestyles, and traditions on a concrete terrain with Southern and country values, and shares how those values not only weathered the storm of many generations but how they armed interviewees to defend what some call an all-out attack on the Blues People in the present day. This is an ongoing project conducted from the perspective of a folklorist and ethnographer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article details the origins of American folklore studies by examining how "the folk" were repeatedly equated to Black Americans and how folklore was used as a measure of African Americans' post-emancipation "progress." Attending to discussions of Black representation in the late nineteenth century, I explore how (1) African Americans were positioned as the folk and (2) how African Americans (re)positioned themselves in discourses of "Blackness" and "folkness." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1960s and 1970s are major periods in the reconstruction of African American identity. This recreation can be seen in the way such Black Arts Movement-era authors as Amiri Baraka, William Melvin Kelley and Ishmael Reed have reinvented the collective memory of the African American community. They did so either by destroying the facts previously established by the Whites or by manipulating them to make them correspond to their own ideas of self-determination and cultural pride. They used legends and legendification, heroization or again, empathy toward oppressed people to achieve their goal. Among the practices, there are also the subversion of stereotypes, the use of African and African American folklores, as well as the transfers of places and topoi to create an overlapping of the two continents to favor this identity reconstruction of the Black minority of the USA.

The article comments on an article of African-American folklorist Frank D. Banks in an 1894 issue of the "Journal of American Folklore," which focused on plantation courtship rituals among slaves in the U.S. One significance of Banks' article is the opportunity it gave to trace the presence of a Black folklore practice. Brief information about Banks is offered. Some known people engaged by the Hampton Folklore Society included Booker T. Washington, T. Thomas Fortune and Anna Julia Cooper.

The article focuses on a talk about reciprocal autoethnography that was given during the 2020 Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society (AFS). The author's decision to conduct a collaborative and community-centered research on African and African-American folklore was her encounters with racism in folklore studies. She also promotes an exhibition on AFS website called "Notable Folklorists of Color: Remembering Our Ancestral Legacies."

This article examines the Brer Rabbit trickster tales of enslaved African Americans. It challenges earlier interpretations of scholars who view the world of Brer Rabbit as amoral and anarchic. Lawrence Levine, for example, claimed that friendship was portrayed as a ‘fragile reed’ in the Brer Rabbit tales. Instead, this article argues that Brer Rabbit did not live in an amoral world; rather, he lived in a world of ethical boundaries. Indeed, friendship, altruism, and commitment to vulnerable members of the community were prized – not derided. For enslaved people in the United States, these values were crucial for survival; yet historians have failed to pay sufficient attention to these themes in the tales. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the first half of the twentieth century, many African Americans in the South regarded owls as harbingers of death. This paper examines interviews conducted by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s to investigate why former slaves repeatedly spoke of the screeching or hooting of an owl as a sign that death was nearby. This belief suggests that African Americans understood these birds to either possess or embody supernatural spirits that were able to move between the spiritual and material worlds, a passage that was very permeable in African- American culture. In an attempt to answer why African Americans regarded owls in this way, this article looks to the characteristics of owls as birds of prey in juxtaposition to black folklore from during and following the slavery era. Many slaves understood that after death, the soul of the deceased returned to the continent of Africa. Spiritual birds of flight facilitated this journey to the land of ancestors acting as guides for spirits or carriers of spirits of dead slaves in the afterlife. As Christianity became more widespread across the antebellum South, the notion of flight enabled slaves to remain confident that their souls would be carried to Heaven upon the snowy white wings of angels and cherubs. Birds and winged creatures were the epitome of liberté totale for enslaved African Americans, a freedom that was achieved through flight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an analysis of Little Mr. Thimble finger and His Queer Country (1894) by Joel Chandler Harris and The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (1899) by Charles Chesnutt, this essay attempts to account 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a young man, the multitalented Roger Abrahams faced several choices that were available to him during the mid-fifties and early sixties of the twentieth century. His own will, mentors, and sheer accidents, put him on the path to a very productive and multifaceted academic scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This memoir of Roger Abrahams is an account of his research, writing, and public activism on African American folk culture and language that he undertook with John Szwed during the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s through the 1980s, and their return to the same issues with their focus on New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the thickly populated scholarship of Roger D. Abrahams, no animal lifts its head more frequently than the mule. This papertraces the corporeal and discursive migrations of this useful but troublesome animal from the Mediterranean to the Americas and back again, emphasizing Catalonia and the American South. Following Abrahams ' conception of "deep stereotyping, " itself drawn from Afi-ican American accounts of personhood and its denial, I identify the mule as a figure of the folk in the modern nation-state: hybrid, uncanny, imperfectly domesticated, conscripted into forced labor, and ultimately abandoned to run feral: the folk gone rogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transferring from elementary to secondary school can be difficult for many children, and students making this transition often suffer from anxiety and stress. One source of stress can be found in the scary stories transitioning pupils hear about their new schools, particularly those about physical education and sport. The purpose of this study was to examine the scary stories young African American adults living in the Deep South recalled hearing about physical education as they made the transition from elementary to secondary school. Folklore and the concept of role reversal were the theoretical perspectives that guided data collection and analysis. Participants were 51 African American students. They wrote down scary stories they recalled hearing prior to transferring to secondary school within a two-item open-ended story record. Stories were coded and categorized and reduced to key themes using analytic induction and constant comparison. The key finding was the scary stories the African Americans in this study recalled were similar to the stories American Caucasians recalled in previous research. The stories collected in this study were also reminiscent of those described in the studies carried out with young adults in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. Results of this study also indicate physical education plays only a peripheral role in the African American folklore surrounding school transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses parallels between African American folklore and the case of Trayvon Martin, an African-American teenager who was fatally shot in February 2012 in Sanford, Florida by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Topics covered include how a female juror in Zimmerman's trial excluded testimony from Black witnesses, early U.S. laws decriminalizing almost anything a White person did to a Black and criminalizing anything a Black did to a White, and relevant folktales.

The centuries-old practice of the skull and bone gangs, a New Orleans African-American folkloric practice, has been taken up and reconstituted by white female artists, in particular in the post-Katrina work of Joy Gauss and Claudia "Mardi Claw" Gehrke. This essay explores the city's evolving culture, in changes that are both troubling and encouraging, that suggest new possibilities for a re-envisioned 21st-century New Orleans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the film "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song," by Melvin Van Peebles. It focuses on the emergence of blaxploitation that serves as the means of cinematic catharsis for African American audiences. It mentions that the film challenges hegemony by requirement self-representation, and the inquiry that the paradigm qualification for a film as blaxploitation should not center on exploitative content.

This article analyzes how the mythological figures of the trickster and the badman, key characters in numerous African-American traditional narratives, have dramatically influenced perceptions of authenticity and notions of communal agency in US hip hop. The article tracks the articulation of these folkloric figures in hip-hop music and reveals the extent to which they are symptomatic of key moments in African-American history. Badman characters (or gangstaz, as they are known in gangsta rap) emerged as meta-juridical figures whose heroic depiction subverted the validity of an evolving legal system that has historically disenfranchised large segments of the African-American community. The trickster, the badman and the gangsta thug are all epiphenomena of institutionalized forms of oppression targeted at the African-American community throughout the history of the United States. It is through an exploration of this genealogy that performances of authenticity in contemporary hip hop become historically intelligible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

That pregnancy can be perceived as a blessed or cursed event is well-recognised in many contemporary societies, but it was a lived and embodied experience for African-American women in the Deep South of the United States in the 19th century. Oral histories from healers, root doctors and midwives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries paint a portrait of the fetus as an invasive spiritual malignancy to be driven from the body, or an ephemeral spirit that could be accidently frightened from an unwelcoming body. This paper explores these beliefs and practices and examines their archaeological signatures. It considers how during and after birth, the infant remained only lightly bound to this world with the spiritual world beckoning beguilingly to them and where spiritual-medical intervention was required to entire the infant's soul to anchor itself to the physical body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Charles W. Chesnutt's use of African American folklore in The Conjure Woman. Specifically, this paper interprets the representation of the oral act of storytelling in the text as an expression of black agency and racial formation. Chesnutt's collection is part of a tradition of Plantation fiction that includes the work of Joel Chandler Harris, an author whose rendition of classical black folkloric tales brought African American folklore into the cultural mainstream. However, Plantation authors frequently deployed racist stereotypes and stock representations of black people in their fiction. Chesnutt's collection, however; demurs from mainstream Plantation fiction in its approach to and understanding of black folklore. Indeed, Chesnutt revises the classical plantation narrative by investing it with racial and political meaning. I therefore argue that Chesnutt's collection of stories may be read as "racial project, "a term used by sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant to describe the representational strategies that (re)produce or destroy concepts of race in American society (1994, p. 56). As my readings demonstrate, Chesnutt accomplishes this through his portrayal of "Uncle Julius," an ex-slave whose "conjure tales" tacitly comment on and disrupt the dominant racial discourse in America society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking into account reassessments of Franz Boas' concepts of race as well as the correspondence between Zora Neale Hurston and Boas, I suggest that Hurston arrived at a crucial turning point between her first and second Florida field expeditions. By following Boas' injunctive to attend to the "manner of rendition" over the content of a folk tale, Huston experienced an epiphany, documented in her correspondence, on the nature of vernacular "lies"--storytelling. Rather than seeing vernacular African American culture as a static tradition, Hurston came to see it as an ongoing, participatory dynamic, in which attention to the manner of rendition is paramount: an aesthetic she incorporated into all of her writing after that point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on 20th-century African-American author Zora Neale Hurston's reification of the Black folk tradition as high art in her 1937 novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God." Topics discussed include the novel's focus on Black ontology, Hurston's codification of values, worldviews and conventions emerging from a global Black consciousness, and folkloric impulses in the novel. Also mentioned are the book's engagement in the storytelling tradition, and Sankofic principles in the novel.

“Ralph Ellison's Exceptional Diaspora” seeks to connect Ellison's intellectual and literary vision of African American culture to the world-historical events of the mid-fifties via the writer's experience in Rome. The work Ellison produced while in residence at the American Academy of Rome – from 1955 to 1957, reveals a radical intellectual, who tenaciously supports the Civil Rights Movement and promotes a transnational approach to the understanding of African American culture and politics, despite the pressure of Cold War politics. The article focuses on the essays “Change the Joke and Split the Yoke” and “Society, Morality and the Novel,” read in conjunction with Ellison's correspondence with fellow writer and friend Albert Murray and with the interview with Preuves, which was occasioned by his participation at the conference of the World Congress for Cultural Freedom in Mexico City in 1957. Thus, the article highlights a little-known Ellison, whose continuous effort to shed light on American reality is mediated by the attention to anticolonial movements, the history of Western imperialism, and its global cultural consequences for the people of the African Diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]