American Folktales Research Articles

Analyses of mwoch: Acholi nicknames

Rationale of Study – Mwoch is an Acholi term for various poetic pronouncements. Depending on the frequency of use and popular reaction, such pronouncements can define individual identity or become community nicknames that work like national anthems. In general, mwoch are folkloric, metaphoric or panegyric statements of opinion on life; in this article, we translate mwoch as nicknames whose main cultural landscape is the Acholi of Northern Uganda. Methodology – Discourse analysis, participant observation, and interviews dating back to the 1940s were among the parameters we used. Yet, we fear that overindulgence in mainstream research methods will ‘get us stuck in a tar baby’ (Disney Walt, 1946). Findings – Though ‘getting stuck in a tar baby’ is culturally North American, it is similar to the Acholi folktale entitled ododo pa apwoyo, oculli ki won poto ngor (tale of the hare, wildcat and the owner of a field of cowpeas). The Hare and Wildcat used to steal the cowpeas; the owner noted goings-on but could not catch the culprits. The theft continued until the owner conceived and crafted a beautiful girl (tar baby) from the latex of a rubber tree and placed it in his field of cowpeas. When the two came to steal the crop, they saw the tar baby, engaged with it and got stuck. Implications – Although Acholi and American folktales strike similar notes, Acholi folktales are often different since they are largely verbal rather than visual and metaphoric rather than overt. Unless analysed and discussed, meanings in such expressions may remain hidden and rather useless to stakeholders, including scholars. Originality – This is an original article whose main goal is to unravel the meanings, if not the knowledge, of a few selected Acholi nicknames.

THE ROLE OF AMERICAN STORIES IN TEACHING ENGLISH

This study examines the effectiveness of using American stories in ESL education to enhance cultural understanding, vocabulary, listening, and pronunciation skills. By engaging with American folktales and literature, students gain exposure to idiomatic expressions, cultural nuances, and diverse language structures within meaningful contexts. Storytelling reduces language anxiety, promotes critical thinking, and provides practical language use models. Suggested classroom applications include storytelling circles, role-playing, and thematic discussions, which collectively foster cultural literacy, engagement, and language proficiency.

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

The Witch in Flight

The Witch in Flight

Interrogating the “Nation” in Contemporary Indian Dance in India and the Diaspora

Nationalism is a problematic concept since it includes and excludes certain groups on different grounds as it suits the State. India excludes marginalized indigenous, Adivasi tribal population and many in the neglected Northeastern region of the sub-continent from the privileges of citizenship. I discuss such exclusions via performances in the genre of Contemporary Indian dance, by providing a brief overview of this style, its origins, techniques and idioms. A pioneering dancer-choreographer of Contemporary Indian Dance, Astad Deboo’s solo, group and collaborative work spanning 50 years, is note-worthy for his choreography with marginalized Manipuri drum-dancers and martial artists in Rhythm Divine I, and Rhythm Divine II: The River Runs Deep. Deboo’s signature style – abstract, meditative and infused uniquely with emotion” is imbibed by the Manipuri dancers. This essay also explores violence perpetrated by the Indian State against poor, tribal Indians as performed in Contemporary Indian Dance by diaspora-based Aparna Sindhoor/Anil Natyaveda’s Navarasa Dance Theater Company in works such as River Rites, showcasing struggles for water rights; A Story and a Song concerned with environmentalism using Indian and Native American folk tales. In Sindhoor’s words, Navarasa’s choreography delves into social justice issues? such as violence against women, environmental degradation, [and] human rights?

The Pedagogics of the Con in Guy Owen's The Ballad of the Flim-Flam Man

ABSTRACT This article examines Guy Owen's novel The Ballad of the Flim-Flam Man. The story is set in the fictitious Cape Fear County, based on Bladen County in eastern North Carolina, a small farming community where Owen was raised. The story features Mordecai Jones, an infamous con artist, and Curley Treadaway, the novel's narrator, a young army deserter on the run who learns the tricks of the trade from Jones. Owen was keenly interested in southern folklore in general and North Carolina folklore in particular and draws heavily on southern folk literary and oral traditions, particularly aspects of trickster figures featured in Southwest humor and African American folktales. The Ballad of the Flim-Flam Man is a humorous novel, but it is also a work that simultaneously celebrates and preserves the wit, wisdom, and artistry of southern oral folktale traditions.

Every Tongue Silenced So One Voice Resounds: Redefining Zora Neale Hurston’s Legacy in Adapted Picture Books

In 2004, noted authors including Christopher Myers and Faith Ringgold began adapting a collection of Zora Neale Hurston's posthumously published anthropological notes into children's picture books. In this article, I examine how these adaptive revisions of Hurston’s scholarly work often mask the complex oral and written history of African American folktales in favor of celebrating a limited portrait of Hurston. In analyzing the picture books’ text, source notes, and illustrations, I contend that they point to the nuanced politics of retooling the legacy of canonical authors in adapted picture books for children.

Entre consejos, diablos y vendedores de caca, rasgos gramaticales del oluteco en tres de sus cuentos

The three Olutec stories from Oluta, Veracruz, were narrated by Antonio Asistente Maldonado. Roberto Zavala presents a morpheme-by-morpheme analysis of the texts with a sketch of the major grammatical and typological features of this language. Olutec is spoken by three dozen speakers. The grammatical structure of this language has not been described before. The sketch contains information on verb and noun morphology, verb dasses, clause types, inverse/direct patterns, grammaticalization processes, applicatives, incorporation, word order type, and discontinuous expressions. The stories presented here are the first Olutec texts ever published. The motifs of the stories are well known throughout Middle America. The story of "the Rabbit who wants to be big" explains why one of the main protagonists of Middle American folktales acquired long ears. The story of "the Devil who is inebriated by the people of a village" explains how the inhabitants of a village discover the true identity of a man who likes to dance huapango and decide to get rid of him. Finally the story of "the shit-sellers" presents twocompadres, one who is lazy and the other one who works hard. The hard-worker asks the lazy compadre how he survives without working. The latter lies to to him that he sells shit in the neighboring village. The hard-working compadre decides to become a shit-seller and in the process realizes that the lazy compadre deceived him. However, he is lucky and meets with the Devil who offers him money in compensation for having been deceived. When the lazy compadre realizes that the hard-working compadre has become rich, he tries to do the same business but gets beaten in the process.

Mules and Men and Messiahs: Continuity in Yoruba Divination Verses and African American Folktales

Abstract Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men reveals that African Americans were able to revise, restructure, and reformulate African orature to fit their social, political, and spiritual needs. This study examines the transformation of Yoruba ese Ifá (Ifá divination verses) into folktales and analyzes the similarities and divergences in the content and characters of the orature. This essay highlights the subtle ways that African Americans politicized and revolutionized the ese Ifá to protect the verses’ wisdom and facilitate their proliferation. The revised ese Ifá, disguised as innocuous folktales, were central to the formation of the African American worldview because they reminded dislocated Africans that divinity was not restricted to an invisible entity or controlled by a select few but was both an inheritance and an imperative essential for liberation and self-actualization.

The Greenwood Library of American Folktales

The Greenwood Library of American Folktales

Assessing the Authenticity of Joel Chandler Harris's Use of Gullah

Few linguists have analyzed the famous African American folktales published by Joel Chandler Harris, but most who have done so have strongly supported the authenticity of Harris's representation of the language used in the stories. Harris's use of Gullah in some of his stories, however, has escaped professional attention except by one linguist, Sumner Ives, who confirmed the phonological accuracy of the representation. The in-depth analysis undertaken here of one of Harris's “Daddy Jack” tales (1881), comparing the language used with other more modern sources, linguistic as well as literary, and with data on other creoles, demonstrates overwhelmingly that Harris's “constructed Gullah,” while slightly biased toward a “basilectal” version (as was Lorenzo Dow Turner's), is extraordinarily accurate in most respects, and should be recognized as the earliest extensive valid record of this variety.

Storytelling Live! (review)

Reviewed by: Storytelling Live! Christin Essin Storytelling Live! Featuring DovieThomason and Dolores Hydock. International Storytelling Center, Jonesborough, TN. 13and 17June 2008. Each year, between June and October, the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee, hosts a series of solo performances, bringing a diverse collection of nationally and internationally renowned storytellers to this small Appalachian town. The "Storytelling Live!" series is an outgrowth of the National Storytelling Festival, a weekend event held each October that attracts tourists (approximately ten thousand) and northeast Tennessee natives alike. What began as locals telling stories from the back of a hay wagon has evolved into an expansive operation that overwhelms Jonesborough with a sea of white tents housing simple platform stages and hundreds of folding chairs for listening audiences. Since opening in 2002, the center has established a permanent presence on Main Street, contributing to Jonesborough's quiet mountain tourism that touts Appalachian culture through sales of handmade quilts, jams and jellies, and local bluegrass albums. To attend the center's storytelling performances, therefore, is to participate in the local cultural economy. Since the early 1970s, when town councilman (later mayor) Jimmy Neil Smith launched the festival to boost fall tourism, Jonesborough proclaimed itself a Mecca for storytelling—an Appalachian outpost dedicated to preserving oral narratives and a dying breed of bards and balladeers whose embodied performances sustain this indigenous mountain culture. Growing up in neighboring Johnson City, I occasionally attended the festival, and during my most recent visit, I caught two "Storytelling Live!" performances at the center's new Krispy Kreme Storytelling Theater. (The center functions as a nonprofit organization, funding its endeavors through a combination of corporate support from local businesses like Krispy Kreme as well as grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Tennessee Arts Commission.) On 13 and 17 June, respectively, I saw Dovie Thomason, a Pennsylvania-based storyteller with Lakota and Plains Apache heritage, and Dolores Hydock, a self-professed Northerner adjusting to life in Alabama. Both had been featured tellers at previous festival events; indeed, the series helps the center build relationships with an international ensemble of oral-narrative performers. The diverse range of storytellers, exemplified by the series' inclusion of performers with Irish, Cuban, Australian, Native American, and US Northern and Southern regional traditions, indicates the center's dedication to preserving storytelling by recognizing how it connects Appalachia to a global network of local cultures that share the impulse to keep their indigenous artistry from disappearing in the wake of relentlessly advancing postmodern technologies and consumer landscapes (Krispy Kreme franchises exempt, of course!). The "Storytelling Live!" performers spend week-long residencies at the center, offering hour-long daily matinees to an intergenerational audience as well as the occasional children's or adult-oriented evening concert. Unlike the festival's enormous white tents, the Krispy Kreme Theater is an intimate space seating just under a hundred spectators; the small wooden stage is set merely with a microphone stand and a tall, antique Shaker-style chair. Storytellers pull from their repertoire for each matinee, performing a range of material so audiences can return the next day and encounter a new set of stories. Thomason's show opened with two Native American folktales featuring animal characters (e.g., foxes, buffalos, and bears), and concluded with a Lakota creation myth about the spirit Wohpe and the four brothers of the North, South, East, and West winds. Thomason linked the myths with personal narratives about gardening, twenty-first-century [End Page 326]"buffalo-hunting" (obtaining meat via FedEx express shipping), and learning the art of storytelling from her grandmother and the Lakota community. She engaged the audience with her theatrical style, conveying the animals through exaggerated vocal patterns, gestures, and facial expressions (the bear growled and spoke gruffly, while the chipmunk wiggled and watched in wide-eyed wonder). During the moments of personal narrative, Thomason spoke in a warm, inviting tone and made direct eye-contact with spectators. Soft lighting throughout the stage and auditorium aided the intimate exchange, encouraging a feeling of shared space. Although the minimal staging approximates the spare aesthetic and direct address of many stand-up comics and solo performance artists, storytellers at...

The Girl Who Helped Thunder and Other Native American Folktales (review)

The Girl Who Helped Thunder and Other Native American Folktales (review)

Tales of tricks and greed and big surprises: Laymen's views of the law in Dutch oral narrative

AbstractNeither in Dutch nor in European narrative folklore does the lawyer have a positive reputation. It does not matter whether we look at the past or the present: in folktales the practice of lawyers is associated with greed, trickery and heartlessness. In the Middle Ages, when the profession was literally for sale, judges were accused of corruption and incompetence, but their reputation improved over time when they became well-educated and impartial professionals. In present and past, the common man looks upon justice as incomprehensible and unpredictable. European and American folktales (especially jokes) about law and lawyers basically share the same themes, but there is a remarkable difference in quantity nowadays. Whereas lawyer jokes are hype in the U.S., they are not in the Netherlands or Western Europe. The main reason seems to be the American “vulture culture” of suing, claiming, and cashing, as exposed in the news media. If Dutch and European lawyers take over the mores of their American colleagues, it will just be a matter of time before a vast number of lawyer jokes are transferred and translated.

The Greenwood Library of American Folktales, 4 vols. by Thomas Green, Editor

The Greenwood Library of American Folktales, 4 vols. by Thomas Green, Editor

Proceed with Caution: Using Native American Folktales in the Classroom

The author contrasts picturebook retellings of Native tales with the original stories to illustrate that selecting Native American folktales for use in the classroom is a more complex task than simply pulling a book off the shelf.

Going Deep

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Hyde refers to Legba, a Yoruba trickster that survived the “middle passage” into African American folk tales, as a “cosmic linguist” who “translates among the spheres” (1998, p. 259). Henry Louis Gates, Jr., describes Legba as “the guiding force of interpretation itself” (1988, p. 23). Additional informationNotes on contributorsRobert E. TerrillHe received his M.A. at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he had the very good fortune to work closely with Janice Hocker Rushing. He shall remain always her student.

American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress (review)

American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress Cristina Bacchilega (bio) American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress. Edited by Carl Lindahl . Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003. Two vols. 729 pp. As Peggy A. Bulger announces in the foreword, this is "a major contemporary publication that draws upon the spoken word traditions found in the Archive of Folk Culture. Here you will find Jack tales as told by traditional storyteller Ray Hicks; stories from the South as collected by John and Alan Lomax; as well as tall tales, jokes, children's stories, and personal experience narratives from contemporary American life" (xvi). In these two precious volumes, Carl Lindahl, Martha Gano Houston Research Professor of English at the University of Houston, presents 215 tales transcribed from sound recordings in the American Folklife Center and the Archive of Folk Culture of the Library of Congress. Each story in the collection is numbered and presented with information about the teller, the recorder, and the performance; the oldest recordings are from the 1930s, the most recent ones date from 2001. The first volume includes thirty-two tales told by the celebrated storytellers from the Hicks-Harmon family of southern Appalachia, Samuel Harmon, Maud Long, and Ray Hicks; fifty-three tales by five other American storytellers follow grouped under the headings "Sara Cleveland: Irish American Tales from Brant Lake, New York"; "J. D. Suggs: Itinerant Master"; "Joshua Alley: Down-East Tales from Jonesport, Maine"; "Will 'Gillie' Filchrist: Tales of Injustice in the Urban South"; and "Jane Muncy Fugate: [End Page 105] Healing Tales for a Mountain Child and Troubled Adults." The second volume includes twenty-eight tales collected by John Lomax (1867–1948) and his son Alan Lomax (1915–2002); twenty legends, twelve tall tales, thirty-two jokes, and fourteen stories for children; twenty stories concerning experiences from American history ranging from Native American tales and accounts of "Slavery Days and the Civil War" to "Struggles with Nature and Neighbors" and "Dust Bowl Tales" about massively destructive dust storms in the 1930s; and four "Folktales in the Making: The September 11 Project." The organization of the stories clearly reflects Lindahl's ambitious and complex vision of the project, which he explains in his introductory chapters. His approach, especially in the first volume, is "storyteller-centered"; his focus is on representatively American storytelling traditions; his scope is oral tales only; his transcription methodology favors readability and consistency, and seeks to resist condescension. Accessible and informative, the chapter "American Folktales: Their Stuff and Styles" articulates a definition of the folktale that Lindahl acknowledges is both narrow—"a folktale is shared by a 'folk,' a narrative community" orally and not in print, and performed by "community artists" who, on the basis of "shared values and esthetics," are recognized within their communities to be "master narrators"—and expanded to include "any traditional tale," whether it be fictional or based on beliefs, history, or personal experience. I would not be alone in finding this to be a rather unorthodox, even shaky, definition and in resisting its generalized use, but within this book and in combination with an emphasis on the storytellers' lives, it allows Lindahl to avoid creating "a skewed impression" of the storytellers' repertoires and to appreciate more fully the relationship of stories to the tellers' experiences. Moving from "personal style" to "generic and cultural styles," the chapter then outlines distinctively American features of these "folktales." For instance, Lindahl asserts that the American märchen proper is not well known but was definitely popular in Appalachia; the American hero receives less magic help than the European; the giant is the most common opponent in American tales of magic, while the dragon is extremely rare; and marriage is not as commonly part of the happy ending formula. About the jokes in the collection, Lindahl warns us that they "will seem foreign to most modern American readers," since they were "learned" by tellers over a century ago and collected in the first half of the twentieth century. Other interesting observations are made about tall tales, legends, and personal narratives, but the discussion of magic tales and jokes stands out as offering fresh insight into what...

American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress

American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress

Surviving through the Days: Translations of Native California Stories and Songs: A California Indian Reader

Surviving Through the Days: Translations of Native California Stories and Songs: A California Indian Reader. Edited by Herbert W. Luthin. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xxi + 639, acknowledgments, photographs, tables, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper) Surviving Through the Days is an extensive resource. There are the promised stories and songs, but much more. Each story has an introduction that gives the history of the collecting situation and often includes biographical material on the narrator, collector and translator, and suggestions for further reading. Many of the stories are presented in ethnopoetic format to suggest the rhythm of oral delivery, preserving as much as possible the style of the original tellers. Physical and cultural settings are painted in as much detail as possible to help bring us into another world. California Indians have a high degree of linguistic diversity and there is no uniform orthography. A small section in the book's introduction that deals with the overlapping and conflicting ways to pronounce the languages is somewhere between helpful and frustrating to the reader. Fortunately, many of the translators give linguistic help with individual stories, easier to absorb for the selection that immediately follows. Several examples of word-for-word translation and parallel translation into poetic English are very enlightening, as they show grammar and repetition of phrasing as part of a performer's style of telling or singing; these interlinear translations often help the reader imaginatively recreate narrators' thinking processes as well. If the languages of California Indians are foreign to many Anglo readers, the Native American sense of narration is equally foreign. This explains why there are so many books of simplified Native American folktales in school libraries. Stories are shoehorned into the Aesop's Fables format for accessibility to the average student. Characters and plots are simplified to the point of blandness. The requisite European beginning, middle and end are imposed, good guys and bad guys are clearly defined, problems are solved, and the ending is as clear as an exclamation point. For those who have previously experienced Native American narrative only from this type of source, Surviving through the Days is a revelation. Here is complexity of character and motive; mystery; ribaldry; and no clear anything. As a professional storyteller who works with groups of all ages, I welcome this complexity and appreciate the detail given with each selection to help the outsider understand it. Too often, storytellers and other educators work only with simplified, dumbed-down representations of cultures unfamiliar to us. Our lack of knowledge results in passing on this false impression of boring simplicity. …