Abstract

ALTHOUGH the fashion for studies of folktale diffusion has waned dramatically, the origins of Afro-American narratives are the subject of continued debate, a prominent issue in the broader controversy over the sources of black culture in the African Diaspora. While the international associations of American tales are seldom self-evident, the clear affinities between the Afro- and Euro-American samples indeed question the degree to which enslaved Africans and their descendants borrowed from, contributed to, or cooperated in 'European' folklore in the New World. The most recent round in this dispute proceeds from Richard Dorson's claim that only a small percentage of the Afro-American tale repertoire derives from Africa, a position vigorously contested by folklorists and anthropologists who discern a much greater African contribution in New World narrative.' Ironically, both Dorson and his Africanist critics advance their views as affirmation of the viability and vitality of black culture in the hostile Americas, yet both have resorted to untenable generalizations subverted by their abuse of inconclusive and inconsistent tale indexes. In their attempt to quantify the source of the Afro-American sample in its entirety, they have compiled expansive tabulations enumerating 'reports' of various proposed types and motifs from the available bibliographies, though anyone who actually assembles and examines the texts (or rather the accessible texts) cited under a selection of entries from these works soon recognizes that, during the daunting process of preliminary classification for subsequent analysis, indexers have as an expedient constantly classed together transparently unrelated narratives, an aberration that can only be rectified through detailed historic-geographic investigation of individual tale categories. Despite the claims of Dorson and his detractors, the current editions of the type and motif indexes in themselves are patently unreliable as indicators of genetic relations between the stories catalogued therein.2 Moreover, such sweeping surveys of second-hand reports from tentative reference aids create the fallacious impression of the impersonal, wavelike automigration of folktales,3 since these speculations on the 'probable' dissemination of narratives are typically unimpeded by the very cultural conflicts that epitomize the topic; that is, even precluding positive identification of European or African antecedents or absolute demonstration of American origins for individual stories, the contested corpus itself suggests that tradition bearers from inimical cultures found frequent opportunity to communicate artfully, a neglected phenomenon essential to understanding tale-telling and transmission as human activities. The example to be discussed here is particularly intriguing in this regard; according to some black narrators, the tale of the Land of Cockaigne diffused from European to Afro-American oral tradition because of, not in spite of, this antagonism. The proposed tale-type for Cockaigne or Schlaraffenland (Aarne-Thompson 1930) actually subsumes a number of motifs describing a realm of miraculous abundance or employing the familiar theme of the World Turned Upside Down, motifs whose wide distribution and variety suggest that many are independent inventions rather than cognate migrants.

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