Theorizing Folklore from the Margins

Critical and Ethical Approaches

Solimar Otero, Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780253056078
• eBook ISBN: 9780253056108
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The study of folklore has historically focused on the daily life and culture of regular people, such as artisans, storytellers, and craftspeople. But what can folklore reveal about strategies of belonging, survival, and reinvention in moments of crisis?

The experience of living in hostile conditions for cultural, social, political, or economic reasons has redefined communities in crisis. The curated works in Theorizing Folklore from the Margins offer clear and feasible suggestions for how to ethically engage in the study of folklore with marginalized populations. By focusing on issues of critical race and ethnic studies, decolonial and antioppressive methodologies, and gender and sexuality studies, contributors employ a wide variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches. In doing so, they reflect the transdisciplinary possibilities of Folklore studies.

By bridging the gap between theory and practice, Theorizing Folklore from the Margins confirms that engaging with oppressed communities is not only relevant, but necessary.

PART I

Critical Paths

Introduction

How Does Folklore Find Its Voice in the Twenty-First Century?
An Offering/Invitation from the Margins

SOLIMAR OTERO AND MINTZI AUANDA MARTÍNEZ-RIVERA

The genesis of this book began with a collaborative project with Chiricú Journal in January 2017. John Nieto-Phillips, general editor of Chiricú, invited us to coedit a special volume on Latinx folklore. The 2016 presidential elections had just passed, and hate crimes and violence against ethnic, racial, sexual, religious, national, and differently-abled-body minorities were rising quickly. Hence, we decided to focus on how poder y cultura work together to create, model, and express a different society, a society more equal and just. The terms poder y cultura loosely translate to “power and culture,” and the valence of their pairing in Latinx and Latin American contexts signifies a relational process. That is, poder y cultura work through each other in helping create individual and communal reinventions of the self, tradition, and belonging. We were especially interested in how practices of poder y cultura inform vernacular cultural expressions in ways that serve to empower minority communities across contexts, cultures, and borders and that can also challenge the status quo. Contributions focused on issues of migration, violence (both intellectual and physical), spirituality, digital humanities, and other topics. We also aimed to challenge the ways in which academic knowledge is presented (mainly the format of “academic” writing) by incorporating pieces that mixed academic and creative writing in the academic/article section. The special volume was published in December 2017, and by February 2018, Chiricú Journal was recognized by Project Muse as journal of the month, in large part because of the reception of our special volume. The work done for Chiricú Journal inspired the ethics, methods, and outcomes of this volume. We wanted to further examine the elusive yet visceral nature of the conception and experience of poder y cultura by centralizing the epistemologies of the communities typically the subject of folklore studies. In many ways, the seeds for this project were planted much earlier.

MINTZI’S MEMORIES

I remember my first meeting with the American Folklore Society (AFS), when I met Solimar. I was starting my second year of graduate school, and while I had an amazing supporting community, in my department I was one of the few Latinas and women of color. I remember feeling intellectually isolated.

During my undergraduate career at the University of Puerto Rico, I had been exposed to European (mainly French) and Latin American postmodernism. I had been trained to question the status quo and to analyze how people, through cultural vernacular practices, create, imagine, and challenge hegemonic structures. Recognizing the privilege that a higher education means, as students at the University of Puerto Rico, living and growing up in a colony, we were also taught that what we research matters and can have a real impact in the world. Therefore, whatever we studied and researched had to have a positive impact in the communities that we inhabit.

Excited to join the Folklore and Ethnomusicology Department at Indiana University Bloomington, I arrived in Bloomington thirsty for knowledge and eager to learn. But that first year, with very few exceptions, the scholarship that I read and engaged with did not speak to me, my reality, or the reality of the communities where I do fieldwork. However, in one course, in my second semester, I was briefly exposed to Indian postcolonial and subaltern studies, such as those of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty, and I clung to those scholars as if they were lifeboats. From there I discovered Latin American postcolonial and subaltern studies (including those by Walter Mignolo, John Beverly, and Florencia Mallon). I was so happy that I had found scholars that spoke to me. But as I read and engaged with those ideas, I had trouble incorporating them into my coursework. I was ignored by both faculty and classmates every time I tried to mention that scholarship in class discussions, and in some cases, professors even penalized me for citing Latin American scholars in my work.

So, I arrived at the AFS meeting looking for a community that spoke my intellectual language, that shared my experience of being the “only one, or one of the few,” and that felt a core and intrinsic responsibility, love, and engagement with the communities that open their homes to us as researchers and folklorists. That is when I met Solimar and other members of the Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean community. This amazing community welcomed, embraced, mentored, and adopted me. The conversations that we had and still have are, contrary to what some may believe, full of love and joy for what we do and aim to accomplish with our work. We do not shy from difficult conversations regarding our work or our positionality (both within academia and within our communities), nor are we afraid to push each other to help make our work stronger. As a community, we also recognize the legacy of our intellectual ancestors, other folklorists of color that have paved the way for us. And while our work is not considered mainstream, and we remain in the margins of the discipline, we have benefited from the transdisciplinary exchange of ideas that germinate only in the most unexpected places. This is what I found at my first AFS meeting many years ago.

This book is for the young Mintzi who needed it when she began graduate school. This is the book that she would have loved to read then.

SOLI’S SAINTS

I am sitting in my godmother Tomasa’s living room in front of her saints and orichas, listening to the noisy Havana afternoon traffic. Shouts of “¡Tamalero!” and “¡Oye ven acá!” are sprinkled between blaring horns, clanking engines, and whooshing truck beds bouncing metallically off the potholes found on the calzada. My job is to help clean the altars and dust around the tureens that house my aunt’s divinities. Music is added to the layers of sound and accompanies my work, as my cousin, Devist, begins to blare Ozuna, a Puerto Rican trap artist, from his room. The orichas seem to like the music, and I feel newly inspired as I reposition the huge racimo de plátanos indios, bunch of red plantains, in front of both Changó and Santa Bárbara, who share a place of honor at the center of the house’s altars (see fig. I.1). As I am saluting and speaking to my aunt’s orichas, I feel a sense of kinship and recognition.

These entities touch my life in both ephemeral and tangible ways that feel familial. The orichas’ presence reminds me of the story told to me earlier this morning by my great uncle, Tío Enrique, about the last meal my deceased mother, Maria Julia, ever had in Cuba, in that very living room about fifty years ago. Like that revelation, touching and cleaning the santos provides keys to mysteries and connections that bind me to my family and culture. There are endless details to be discovered, memories to capture, and future work to be done in rituals that commemorate ancient knowledge with new understanding and purpose.

There are likewise a multitude of similar moments that span a day of living and “doing fieldwork” with my family and interlocutors in Cuba. Some of them are untranslatable, some of them are indescribable, and some of them are secret. How do they relate to my own understanding of folklore, a field and subject of study that I have devoted over twenty-five years of my life to? How do the sensations, stories, and ritual experiences of my time in Cuba connect to the papers, books, and lessons I create in the United States? What do my connections and dislocations have in common with other people I know, similarly engaged in religiosity and scholarship and art? Like the young, wonderful Mintzi, I am still waiting for some of the answers that will help me navigate these questions.

Fig. I.1 Santa Barbara and Changó Altar, Havana, Cuba, 2019. Photo by Solimar Otero.

HISTORICAL INTERVENTIONS

Theorizing Folklore from the Margins is an invitation from the margins, points of contact and disconnection that make up the emerging landscape of folklorists who study and belong to communities that engage in everyday forms of culture in order to thrive, resist, and enact ways of being in an often hostile world. The virulent legacies of white supremacy, patriarchy, and homophobia that persist in our society make studying transnational expressive cultures such as Cuban Santería a particularly important and daunting task. The colonial plantation system that set up the racial and religious inequalities found in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the southern United States left institutional patterns of silencing and co-opting the histories and communities responsible for creating the texture of tradition and resistance that makes each of these places unique. What does the study of folklore look like if we assume a different starting point, one located in the center of the rhizomatic and dense location of cultural contact, conflict, and borrowing rather than “discovery”? What if we embrace the notions of mystery, confusion, and apprenticeship in working with communities in shared projects? This would take a shift in authority and change the way that we write, work, and build relationships. The work in this volume invites interaction with people, ideas, and creative expression in dynamic frameworks that question and reposition the power of representation, analysis, and interpretation. As a way to demonstrate this reformulation of perspectives, the chapters in this book are geographically and culturally diverse and embedded; they are written with a transnational intersectionality in mind.

We seek to do more than critique the institutional structures and scholarly practices that marginalize and yet also romanticize the cultures and persons often studied under folklore. We invite readers to consider reconceptualizing the very notions of history, power, and culture from the locations of their vernacular creation, invoking Édouard Glissant’s provocative phrasing: “We demand the right to opacity” (1990, 189–190).¹ In other words, we suggest embracing the complexity of marginalized cultures that resist the universalizing tendency, the knowability of the other, that Western philosophy and academic discourses impose on non-Western subjects. Glissant roots his philosophical critique of colonialism in the diversity of Caribbean cultures and folklore. Our approach mirrors his in suggesting that everyday forms of multiplicity and specificity are essential tools for generating anticolonial creative and academic work. We are not alone in suggesting that practices like “listening in detail”² can be the first step to doing critical and ethical work in the study of folklore.

The study of folklore has historically focused on showcasing the daily life of regular people, such as artisans and storytellers, as well as analyzing vernacular expressive cultural practices. One of the main concerns of the field since its inception in the nineteenth century has been the issue of authentic representation in the expression of discernable cultures. We would like to turn away from this search for authenticity and the verifiability of the vernacular as a means to justify the study of folklore. Rather, this volume asks folklorists to consider how effective they have been in theorizing with collaborators and from the location of expressive culture in understanding their mutual roles and exchanges. At play here is recognizing the necessity for reflexivity on the part of the researchers with regard to the ways their presence and work affect the communities they engage with. Conversely, we also are curious as to what the communities that we study, and at times are a part of, reveal about vernacular strategies of belonging, survival, and reinvention in times of trouble.

This anthology builds on and also departs from existing scholarship on folkloristics. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the field adopted several critical turns that certain anthologies exemplify. Collections like Towards New Perspectives in Folklore, edited by Américo Paredes and Richard Bauman (1972), and Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture, by Rosan Jordan and Susan Kalcik (1985), set the stage for real considerations of performance traditions and women’s culture, respectively. A more recent collection is Domino Renee Perez and Rachel González-Martin’s (2018) Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture, which invites cultural critics to think about the interconnection between popular culture and folklore and this connection’s relationship with the intersectionality of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. This collection opens similar paths to our own by introducing new approaches to the study of popular culture grounded firmly on communities’ receptive creativity and meta-analysis.

Theorizing Folklore from the Margins also engages in the study of marginalized beliefs and groups. Volumes that deal with belief and subaltern studies, such as Out of the Ordinary, by Barbara Walker (1995), and The Stigmatized Vernacular, edited by Diane Goldstein (2016), reflect the kinds of original insight and discussion for folklore studies that we seek to build on. One especially influential collection for us in building this anthology is Chicana Traditions, edited by Norma Cantú and Olga Nájera-Ramírez (2002). Our book likewise uses a racially critical lens with which to investigate key questions concerning power, representation, and epistemology from the perspective of groups that have transnational and translocal roots. The chapters offered here also move in the spirit of Jacqui Alexander’s (2005) Pedagogies of Crossing by simultaneously archiving and creating paths that resist empire and invoke hope for the multiple communities and cultures we engage with.

CRITICAL PATHS

The central concerns that inform this volume’s call for the critical are intimately tied to social activism. To be clear, the essays in this book do not relegate the practice of social activism solely to the realm of discernable civil organizations or political movements. Instead, we invite readers to consider how the creators of folk culture deploy their expressions to specific social and personal ends that make spaces for liberation. Here, liberation is defined in multiple ways and refers to a range of registers and experiences that are cocreated, including those of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, (dis)ability, and national identity. Thus, we urge folkloristics to consider the long-overdue intersections between the study of folklore and such approaches as postcolonial studies, critical race studies, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and continuing fora...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I. Critical Paths
• Part II. Framing the Narrative
• Part IV. Placing Community
• Index