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Re(Making) the Folk: The Folk in Early African American Folklore Studies and Postbellum, Pre-Harlem Literature

Bailey , Ebony Lynne
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3040-5212
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1594919307993345

Abstract Details

2020, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
The Postbellum, Pre-Harlem era is often overlooked in African American scholarship. My dissertation proposes a renewed investigation of this era by studying Postbellum, Pre-Harlem African American writers and their negotiation with a prominent discourse during this period: African American folklore. Since “the folk” were repeatedly equated to Black Americans and folklore was used as a measure of African Americans’ post-emancipation “progress,” nineteenth century Black intellectuals, recognized nineteenth- and twentieth-century folklore as a key site in shaping Black representation. Moreover, they were “active participants” in fashioning the foundations of American folklore (Waters and Hampton 22-46; Lamothe 23-32; Moody-Turner 4, 89). Thus my dissertation explores the “sites of concern and negotiation” that Postbellum, Pre Harlem writers encountered while creating narratives that incorporated African American folklore (Moody-Turner 13); I seek to characterize and historicize the Postbellum, Pre-Harlem’s “racialized regime of folk representation,” discourses that intersected to create the representation of the folk. I conduct this analysis by using a three-pronged approach that combines insights from folklore theory, narrative theory, and African American literature. I call this methodology “positioning.” Using this approach, I study how (1) African Americans were positioned as the folk in a racialized regime, (2) how African Americans (re)positioned themselves, and (3) how African Americans positioned other Black people as the folk. With this methodology, alongside a history of the social construction of “Black folk” in early African American folklore studies and nineteenth-century popular discourse, I examine Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South, Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces, Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “The Goodness of St. Rocque,” Frances E.W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. In these texts, I understand how the folk and folklore are narratively deployed by African American writers. As a result, my dissertation also reveals how these authors, in discussing the folk, employed several strategies such as positioning folk as minor characters, championing racial uplift plots, inserting female folk magic practitioners in romance plots, and crafting native ethnography narrators.
Adeleke Adeeko (Advisor)
Koritha Mitchell (Committee Member)
James Phelan (Committee Member)
Amy Shuman (Committee Member)
236 p.
African American Studies; African Americans; American Literature; Black History; Black Studies; Comparative Literature; Folklore; History; Literature
folk; African American literature; Postbellum, Pre-Harlem; folklorists; folklore studies; narrative theory, Cooper, Du Bois, Hopkins, Chesnutt, Dunbar-Nelson

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Bailey , E. L. (2020). Re(Making) the Folk: The Folk in Early African American Folklore Studies and Postbellum, Pre-Harlem Literature [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1594919307993345

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Bailey , Ebony. Re(Making) the Folk: The Folk in Early African American Folklore Studies and Postbellum, Pre-Harlem Literature . 2020. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1594919307993345.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Bailey , Ebony. "Re(Making) the Folk: The Folk in Early African American Folklore Studies and Postbellum, Pre-Harlem Literature ." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1594919307993345

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1594919307993345
1,936
© 2020, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Re(Making) the Folk: The Folk in Early African American Folklore Studies and Postbellum, Pre-Harlem Literature by Ebony Lynne Bailey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.