American Folktales Research Articles

Speaking in Tongues: An Interview with Science Fiction Writer Nalo Hopkinson

In 1998, Nalo Hopkinson joined the ranks of Black science fiction writers like Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, and Steven Barnes, among others. The Jamaican-born Hopkinson is the daughter of the late Slade Hopkinson, the Guyanese actor, poet, and playwright who was part of Derek Walcott's Trinidad Theatre Workshop. Hopkinson spent her first sixteen years living in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana. For the past twenty-three years she has resided in Toronto, Canada. She infuses the tropes of science fiction and fantasy with Caribbean folklore and culture. In 1997 she won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest for Brown Girl in the Ring (Warner Books, 1998) and is a recipient of an Ontario Arts Council Foundation award for emerging writers; the Locus Award, First Novel Category; and the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Hopkinson's first novel also made the preliminary ballot for the Nebula Award. Brown Girl is a post-Holocaust novel set in the twenty-first century inner city of Toronto, which has suffer ed an economic collapse. The novel chronicles the struggles of one woman, Ti-Jeanne, to reconcile her individuality as a young North American woman and unwed mother with the group orientation of her Afro-Caribbean ancestry, which includes a nascent ability as a mystic. Hopkinson's second novel, Midnight Robber, will appear from Warner Books in March, 2000. Set on a Caribbean-colonized planet and told in a hybrid creole, it is a science fictional allegory for displacement and exile. She counts African American science fiction writers Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler among the writers whose work has inspired her. (Delany was one of the writers-in-residence when Hopkinson attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop at Michigan State University in 1995.) Hopkinson is currently editing The Dub Side, an anthology of Caribbean fabulist fiction. This interview is based on Hopkinson's answers to a series of interrogatories which I presented to her in February, 1999, about Brown Girl and about her perspective as the newest (then) Black science fiction writer and the newest (still) Black female science fiction writer. Rutledge: Why are you a writer of Black fantasy? Hopkinson: Because it's better than being a writer of purple prose? I'm a writer. I'm predominantly black. I write fantasy (actually, I say speculative because my work can include elements of science fiction, fantasy, dark fantasy, horror, and magic realism). I'm not a writer of black fantasy. (I go into that more below.) Rutledge: How long have you been interested in Black fantasy? What do you know of your predecessors like Butler, Delany, Saunders, Barnes, and others? Hopkinson: I think perhaps we're using the word fantasy in different ways, so I need some clarification. Are you using it as an umbrella term for all the genres of fantastical writing? I'm accustomed to hearing it used to name one specific genre. According to the classifications with which I'm familiar, Butler writes science fiction, not fantasy. Delany has written both. Saunders' Imaro trilogy was sword and sorcery (i.e., a sub-genre of fantasy). Barnes writes futuristic action adventure as well as having co-written hard sf with people such as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Tananarive Due has been dubbed a horror author. I don't know Virginia Hamilton's work very well, but she has published young adult science fiction as well as collections of African American folktales. I've read some form of fantastical literature since I was a tot, be it folktales or Homer's Iliad, so I gravitated naturally toward the sf shelves. Some time in my 20s I saw a photograph of Chip Delany, with whose work I'd fallen in love on first encountering it, and realized that he was black. I'd never heard of such a thing before. I wept. It felt as though my universe had just doubled in size. Though my life was surrounded with Caribbean writers of color (my father and his friends), none of them wrote sf. …

Billy Joel's History Lesson

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scriv ener, The Narrative of the Life of Fred erick Douglass, and F. Scott Fitzerald's The Great Gatsby. But a major problem occurred at the front end of the course? just what would we read while the histo ry professor discussed the early, colonial period? John Winthrop's City on the Hill excerpt from A Model of Christian Charity? Or Native American folk tales? Or perhaps captivity narratives? All of these seemed worthy in themselves. Yet the literature of the colonial period con tinued to be a vexing problem, forcing the question, Just what were the students to see? to understand? The course linking was designed for students to think historically, to think of American literature as a sister narrative in this experiment that we call American democracy. Often the chief obstruction to students' thinking historically is their tena cious belief that history has no connection to their lives. This is a problem addressed in E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy, espe cially his controversial list of cultural terms that he thought all citizens needed to

The grandfathers speak: native American folk tales of the Lenape

The grandfathers speak: native American folk tales of the Lenape

Reading with Uncle Sam:

To raise the level of awareness of government publications as educational and recreational assets and to further the development of children's literature as a scholarly resourdce, this paper describes and analyzes government information resources for children through a content analysis of the government literature published between 1940 and 1990. Social issues like drug abuse and consumer product safety, which have guided government policy over the past 5 decades, are reflected in children's books from the government. Although no single topic or issue predominates in the literature, most books aimed at younger readers deal with the following: safety education; drug abuse; the enviroment; health; Native American folktales; birth control; and stamp collecting. Contains an annotated bibliography.

She shall overcome: Overtures to the Trickster heroine

With the growth of the woman's movement in the 1970s and the new attention being given to children's literature, the image of the woman in folktales became a subject for serious consideration. Feminists objected to her stereotyped depictions as passive princess or wicked witch, with little in between. However, the depiction of the woman in folktales has seldom been clearly realized; her role in the tale has been oversimplified and she has been denied motivation and intention. Particularly slighted has been the consideration of the female in American folktales. Such a consideration reveals that while she is often a victim, her independence, moral conviction and active intellect frequently show her to be stronger and certainly more admirable that those who oppress her. While the woman may often submit to others' demands, her behavior may be explained as the only means she has to survive or as the best means she has to subvert an uncompromising system. Admittedly, open rebellion is impossible, subject as woman is to cruel and even lascivious fathers and to the brutal or merely thoughtless whims of lovers and husbands. Yet, even in tales where woman is dominated and oppressed, she may be able to manipulate the forces that deny her freedom, may be able to struggle towards a selfhood. That selfhood becomes evident in her role as witch and even in her roles as ghost and spirit. In addition, when other tales are examined (not in the province of this paper), the female in American folktales emerges as ‘The Trickster Heroine.’ This paper concentrates on the tales which emphasize the need for her transformation and suggest the wit and wiliness she has that will enable her to become this ‘heroine’.

Pleistocene Animals in Folk Memory

MAMMOTHS AND MANKIND LIVED TOGETHER in North America millennia ago. One human even carved the image of a mammoth on a shell, but because of geological ambiguity in the Delaware River Valley it is impossible to assign a precise date to the occurrence. It could be extraordinarily ancient artifact (circa 40,000 B.C.), but it is safer to assign a transitional Paleo-Archaic date to it (circa 8000 B.C.).1 The latter date will occasion little surprise among archaeologists, even though there is little actual documentation of the relation of mammoths and Homo sapiens. At unknown date the mammoths were gone (by 6000 B.C. at the latest), but Homo sapiens continued. In the wake of the Delaware River find, one archaeologist urged the examination of Native American legends for examples of the retention of the mammoth in oral tradition. She offered a Huron legend of a great Moose as an obvious attempt on the part of people who had never seen a mammoth or mastodon, and hence had no idea of its size, to relate the story of the largest animal they knew.2 This is by no means obvious, but it is not implausible idea, since the question of the retention of Pleistocene megafauna in Native American folktales has been continually debated by scholars for two centuries.

American Folk Tales Series

American Folk Tales Series

American Folk Tales and Songs and Other Examples of English-American Tradition as Preserved in the Appalachian Mountains and Elsewhere in the United States

American Folk Tales and Songs and Other Examples of English-American Tradition as Preserved in the Appalachian Mountains and Elsewhere in the United States

American Folk Tales and Songs: A Treasury of Lively Old-Time English-American Lore

American Folk Tales and Songs: A Treasury of Lively Old-Time English-American Lore

The Role of Obscenity in the Folk Tales of the "Intellectual" Stratum of Our Society

ALTHOUGH OBSCENITIES are fully functioning elements in the folk tales of all societies, they have an additional significance in connection with the tales told in modern urban America, in that they determine whether the mode of transmission of the tales is folkloristic, i.e., by world of mouth, or potentially literary. This is true because American literary tradition, for the most part, avoids obscenities. Non-obscene tales are frequently published as newspaper fillers, or in anthologies, and have a more pervasive function in providing plots, incidents, and characters for short stories of the popular magazine type; hence they soon creep out of the realm of folklore into that of literature. Obscene stories, on the other hand, have a tendency to remain in the purely oral tradition, with the consequence that almost all of the urban American folk tales that can be compared with the folk tales of non-literate peoples contain obscenities.

Print and American Folk Tales

Print and American Folk Tales