Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, 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 (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Adeleke Adeeko (Advisor); Koritha Mitchell (Committee Member); James Phelan (Committee Member); Amy Shuman (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; American Literature; Black History; Black Studies; Comparative Literature; Folklore; History; Literature