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The introduction details an alternative genealogy through which to approach both African American folklore studies and African American literary engagements with black folklore in the post-reconstruction period, centering African Americans as active participants, rather than merely passive repositories, in the study and representation of black folklore. It proposes a corrective to both the discipline of folklore studies and a new lens through which to read representation of folklore in African American literature. In particular, the introduction shows how developments in folklore studies were inseparable from turn-of-the-century constructions of race.

Chapter three argues that the work of the Hampton Folklore Society must be understood within, but also beyond, the bounds of both the Hampton Institute and the “scientific” frame offered by the American Folklore Society. This chapter shows how the folklorists, focusing specifically on folklorists Robert Moton, resisted having their work confined to the ideology of the Hampton Institute, while also questioning the politics of assuming a “scientific,” and often objectifying, approach to the study of their own traditions. Set within the context of the emergence of the “New Negro” ideal, the second half of this chapter examines how the Society became a site of lively dialogue, where members of the larger black intellectual community, particularly Anna Julia Cooper, debated folklore’s role in creating a “new,” distinctly African American literature rooted in a social justice agenda.

Chapter five details how Charles Chesnutt, in The Conjure Woman (1899), experimented with African American folklore, especially conjure and ritual, as a way to critique the existing epistemological approaches to understanding black culture and black history, and later, in The Colonel’s Dream (1905) turned his attention to exposing the white-supremacist forms of folklore that worked to reinforce existing structures of race relations. In addition to examining how Chesnutt posited black folklore as an alternative way of constructing, perceiving, and responding to current and historical realities, the chapter also introduces the Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream (1905) as a novel that painstakingly unravels the conflicting fictions of folklore and race by exposing the customary politics of race relations that defined both whiteness, as well as his white characters’ attitudes about race, African Americans, and themselves.

Chapter four argues that Paul Laurence Dunbar, like the Hampton folklorists, had to negotiate the politics of being objectified as a representative embodiment of the African American folklore and/or folk communities he chose to represent. In his literary works, masking and dissimilation become his vehicles for exposing the many intertwined literary and cultural conventions that determined the range of black racial representation. In his 1902 novel, The Sport of the Gods, he critiques the idealized notions of folklore through the text’s depiction of tensions within the Southern folk community. He further challenges the construction of folklore as a Southern, rural phenomenon by introducing a new geographic terrain--the urban North--in which to imagine black folklore, thereby introducing into African American literature alternative geographies for locating African American folklore.

This chapter focuses on ways that southern depression-era authors contributed or responded to a renewed interest in the “old” South during the period. While the Southern Agrarians, William Alexander Percy, and filmmakers like Victor Fleming and William Wyler created nostalgic depictions of antebellum southern life, Richard Wright and Erskine Caldwell responded with “antipastoral” depictions of sharecropping that expose the exploitive social, economic, and environmental effects of plantation agriculture. The chapter also identifies ways that Zora Neale Hurston creates alternative forms of social and environmental thought through her depictions of African American folklore in Mules and Men (1935).

The second chapter focuses on the way the African-American community celebrated the Pinkster holiday. This chapter, entitled “Celebrating Pinkster as an African-American Tradition,” shows how the most spectacular African American Pinkster performances were the king processions in Albany and highlights how different these slave celebrations were from those of the Dutch. It also corrects the assumption that Pinkster was a predominantly rural phenomenon by providing new evidence that the festival was still celebrated by African Americans in the heart of Manhattan in the early nineteenth century.

This chapter covers the timeline from 1960 when New Orleans integrated its public schools, to 2011, the age of computers and the Internet. Integration had an immediate impact on children and their folklore – African American and white children began to communicate on the playground, sharing chants, jokes, jump rope rhymes, taunts, teases, and stories. Through the next forty-four years, schoolchildren of South Louisiana were able to conserve much traditional schoolyard lore while adapting to tremendous social and material changes and incorporating into play elements from media, computers, smartphones, and the Internet. As time passed African American vernacular became trendy among teenage whites. Black popular music became the music of choice for many worldwide. This is a story about how children, African American and “other” have learned to fit play into their rapidly changing society.