African American Folklore

Abstract

African American folklore offers researchers an invaluable framework for insight into the history and worldview of African Americans. Folklore, also called folktales, includes myths, storytelling, recollections, ballads, songs, rap, and other orally transmitted lore. African American folklore, though originally transmitted verbally, assumed a written form in the works of writers such as Charles Chestnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Whatever the genre or form of transmission, folklore is part of the African American's 300-year old oral called (Asante, 1987). More importantly, folldore embodies larger truths and yields much illumination through its study. Folklore is evidence of the ancient African life force and past that Africans forcibly brought to America, maintained through an expressive sense. In The Afrocentric Idea Molefi K. Asante (1987) argues that the scholar, rhetorician, or historian who undertakes an analysis of the African American past without recognizing the important role that orature has played and continues to play in the lives of African Americans is treading on intellectual quicksand (p. 86). According to Asante (1989) no art form reflects the tremendous impact of our presence in America more powerfully or eloquently than does folk poetry in the storytelling tradition (p. 491). Zora Neale Hurston (1995) referred to African American folklore as being the boiled-down juice of human living (p. 875). She maintained that folklore is the art of self-discovery as well as the first creative art of a people, shaping and rationalizing the natural