Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation

Shirley Moody-Turner

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781617038853
• eBook ISBN: 9781628467550
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

Before the innovative work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied, and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, these folklorists worked within but also beyond the bounds of white mainstream institutions. They often called into question the meaning of the very folklore projects in which they were engaged. Shirley Moody-Turner analyzes this output, along with the contributions of a disparate group of African American authors and scholars. She explores how black authors and folklorists were active participants—rather than passive observers—in conversations about the politics of representing black folklore. Examining literary texts, folklore documents, cultural performances, legal discourse, and political rhetoric, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation demonstrates how folklore studies became a battleground across which issues of racial identity and difference were asserted and debated at the turn of the twentieth century. The study is framed by two questions of historical and continuing import. What role have representations of black folklore played in constructing racial identity? And, how have those ideas impacted the way African Americans think about and creatively engage black traditions? Moody-Turner renders established historical facts in a new light and context, taking figures we thought we knew—such as Charles Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, and Paul Laurence Dunbar—and recasting their place in African American intellectual and cultural history.

1 “By Custom and By Law”

Folklore and the Birth of Jim Crow

Those who supported the myth of “separate but equal” were quick to adopt the rhetoric of folklore for support and protection. The notion that the social differences that were supposedly “created” by race could not be nullified by laws can be summed up in the famous adage often attributed to William Graham Sumner: “Stateways cannot change folkways.”¹ This statement represents the proverbial soap that the country, particularly the Northern politicians and press, used to wash their hands of the segregation issue in the South. That American folklore studies grew up amid the fury over racial separation and difference is less a coincidence than a testament to the inextricability of folklore studies from the larger social, cultural, and political currents that defined the second half of the nineteenth century. At its founding, folklore studies was already invested in identifying and studying regional and ethnic groups—Negroes, Indians, bordering groups in Canada and Mexico—that existed within American borders and yet apart from mainstream American society. That these newly discovered “folk” possessed strange and peculiar habits observed and documented in this emerging field of study provided evidence that legislation could do little to change the habits and customs that defined race relations.

Whether wittingly or not, when William Wells Newell co-founded the American Folklore Society (AFS) in the late 1880s, he entered into a national public discourse on the meaning and significance of folklore that was rife with implications for African American cultural representation and social, political, and civic life. By examining several of Newell’s statements on the emerging discipline of folklore, I argue that even though he sought to formalize a scientific and objective approach to folklore studies, there remained tensions and slippage between (and within) his scientific orientation toward folklore studies, competing theories of culture and race, and the place folklore occupied in the larger social, cultural, and political discourse. Despite Newell’s attempts to rein in this most unwieldy of concepts, “folklore” maintained its multiplicity. In considering the confluence of discourses that drew on folkloric rhetoric, specifically in the popular cultural discourses that coalesced around representations of folklore in the minstrel and Plantation Traditions and the political and legal rhetoric that drew a curious line of support from the folkloric rhetoric of “customs and traditions,” I seek to show how these intersecting discourses of folklore were variously deployed in constructing notions of race and nation in the late nineteenth century.

In an 1890 article in the Nation, T. F. Crane announced, “The interest in folklore seems to be steadily increasing in this country.” He took as evidence of this growing interest “the large number of works on the subject … and the substantial support rendered to the American Folklore Society.” He went on to note, however, that the bulk of interest in folklore had adhered around “popular tales,” citing as a reason for their popularity their wide range of appeal to both “learned” and “unlearned” audiences and their adaptability in bolstering various theoretical interpretations.² His contemporary, and the founder of the rival Chicago Folklore Society, Fletcher Bassett concurred, remarking that folklore had indeed become “the subject of the day.”³ As the nineteenth century drew to a close, folklore became increasingly present in U.S. social and cultural consciousness. Leading members of AFS held positions at top universities and came from a range of occupations and disciplines. Founding members included Francis James Child and George Lyman Kittredge from Harvard, American psychologist Stanley Hall, a host of early anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Frank Cushing, philanthropists including Isabel Hapgood and Mary Hemenway, as well as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Joel Chandler Harris, Mark Twain, and Lafcadio Hearn, all members of AFS, rooted their literary writings in folkloric materials, and Harris’s Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880) was a major catalyst in promoting the study of African American folklore.⁴

Despite its growing presence in American public discourse, however, the meaning of folklore in the mid- to late nineteenth century, as suggested by Crane’s remarks on the reasons for folklore’s wide appeal, was still very much in flux (as it remains today). Even as folklore studies became institutionalized in the United States through the work of AFS, Newell’s repeated and urgent attempts to define and delimit the society’s subject and its practice attest to the popularity, and mutability, of the concept of folklore. Indeed, Newell believed the AFS mission was under constant assault by the hordes of amateur collectors who were unable to achieve the requisite objectivity, due either to their fervor for documenting and celebrating their local folklore or ideological biases that colored how they presented the materials they had collected. To counter these tendencies, Newell sought to dissuade his fellow folklorists from engaging in what he saw as theoretical debates that would bias the objective collection and study of folkloric materials. More specifically, he did not wish to see folklore studies enlisted in support of what he considered discredited theories tying folklore and culture to racial or biological determinism. Instead, he repeatedly promoted theories of diffusion, arguing that folklore was not traceable to racial or national origins, but was transmitted through the diffusion of materials via the interaction of different cultures. Finally, for Newell, the underlying principle and major contribution of folklore studies was as a historical science, a project carried out in the interest of reconstructing history. As for the folkloric materials collected, their significance was as remnants of the past surviving in the present and used to interpret and illuminate the past. In other words, folklore comprised the historical record that could show how materials (songs, tales, customs) were diffused, circulated and adapted among cultures. In the discussion that follows, I show how Newell’s methodological, theoretical, and historically-based orientations toward folklore exerted and reflected a powerful, though not uncontested, force in influencing late-nineteenth-century approaches to the study of folklore and culture.

In defining the parameters of American folklore studies, William Wells Newell was an especially significant figure. As co-founder and secretary of AFS and editor of the Journal of American Folklore (JAF), he exerted important influence over shaping the society’s project and determining how folklore would come to be institutionalized in the United States. In articulating his agenda for the 235 members of his organization, Newell stressed the scientific nature of the AFS endeavor, and prioritized the need for the “objective” and extensive collection of folkloric materials. In an 1890 report on the first annual meeting of AFS, Newell used the term “collection” a dozen times in sixteen pages, noting that folklore gave a scientific basis to the “study of popular traditions” and provided for the “additional collection” of materials which the editor of JAF felt was “necessary to elucidate many problems of anthropology.”⁵ In his opening statement for AFS, Newell identified the “principal objective” of the society as establishing a “Journal, of a scientific character, designed (i) For the collection of the fast-vanishing remains of Folk-Lore in America.”⁶ Newell’s almost obsessive emphasis on the scientific nature of folklore studies allowed him to validate his undertaking in relation to the professionalization of intellectual pursuits taking place at the end of the nineteenth century. As Simon Bronner points out, “the formation of folklore societies was part of a larger trend” in which over 200 learned societies were formed throughout the 1870s and 1880s.⁷ These societies, Bronner notes, sought to distinguish themselves by establishing their scientific and intellectual authority in illuminating and building a systematic body of knowledge. To establish folklore studies within this milieu, Newell had to set his work apart from the “popular” collections that were not documented rigorously and whose resulting representations of folklore, he believed, were colored by the perspective of the collector and creative or political influences. To counteract this popular plundering of folklore material, Newell emphasized dutiful collection and faithful transcription of folkloric materials. If folklore was going to contribute anything to current debates on the nature and flow of cultural traditions, Newell insisted, “they cannot possibly be published in popular forms.”⁸ According to Newell, these popular forms did not preserve the integrity of the materials collected and so made them useless in charting the distinct history of traditions as they existed in popular oral culture.

According to Jon Cruz, in the post–Civil War years there was a shift in the interpretation of folklore—particular black spirituals—from the popular, romantic, “meaning-oriented” or “cultural” interpretations of the abolitionist period to the objectivist-oriented, taxonomical or “scientific” interpretations of the 1880s and 1890s. Whereas the abolitionists came to interpret folklore, and specifically the spiritual, through an avowedly cultural and political lens, as “cultural weaponry in the symbolic arsenal against slavery,” this approach, Cruz argues, was eclipsed, displaced, and superseded by folklorists and social scientists: “… the interpretive tone changed from a concern with what was ostensibly moral and political to a preoccupation with what could best be grasped descriptively, taxonomically, and analytically within the larger intellectual schemas of objectification and classification.”⁹ Working within this context, Newell sought to move away from the previous popular, romantic interpretations of folklore and instead stressed an “objectivist-oriented” rather than “meaning-oriented” approach to folklore collection that was more interested in amassing and studying folkloric material and how these texts circulated, than in understanding what the materials might have meant to the people and groups who shared and passed on these traditions.

Hence, in the interest of scientific objectivity, Newell urged his fellow folklorists to avoid theoretical discussions of the materials that recapitulated the romantic nationalism, and hence the biological and racial determinism, he identified with popular approaches to folklore. In an 1890 essay, “Additional Collection Essential to Correct Theory in Folk-lore and Mythology,” Newell went to work discrediting each of the prevailing models of interpreting folklore. In countering theories that supported folklore as a product of racial or national inheritance, Newell noted, “this theory … received a rude shock by the recent demonstrations that differences of race and language are not necessarily an indication of differences in tradition.” As an example he cited the Basque people of Spain, who he maintained “do not seem to have retained any characteristic tales or songs which may be supposed derived from their ancient stock, but rather to have assimilated the lore of modern Europe.”¹⁰ Elsewhere, in a number of articles and books, he built a case against the Aryan origins theory, a version of the inheritance model, by arguing that Arthurian legends were products of French romanticism and not of Celtic folk origins. For Newell, the romantic nationalist approach to folklore was exemplified in the early-nineteenth-century folklore projects of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. In Newell’s estimation, the Grimms, who did not maintain a strict adherence to accurate transcription of oral tradition and who adapted folklore to popular forms, believed folklore was “a racial heritage, transmitted from remote prehistoric epochs.… The traditions of any folk were regarded as truly expressive of its own distinct national genius, its peculiar way of assimilating nature and life.” But this view, Newell asserted, was the result of “warm patriotism” and the desire to construct a unified Germany with a tradition every bit as poetic as the mythologies of ancient Greece.¹¹

In each case, Newell sought to show that the search for national or racial origins was driven by political and ideological motives rather than by a scientific adherence to close and careful collection and analysis. Instead, he emphasized that the creation and transmission of folklore was the result of a complex process of diffusion that took place through the interaction between and among different cultural groups. This approach, at least in theory, allowed Newell to counter the evolutionary origins model, which suggested groups moved linearly through stages of evolution based on their mental and biological inheritances, and that their advancement was evidenced in their cultural or technological productions.

Newell’s attention to the diffusion, rather than the evolution, of cultural material has been celebrated as his, as well as Boas’s, great contribution to the study of culture. In Before Cultures, for example, Brad Evans argues that this early attention—especially as articulated by Franz Boas—to the ability of culture to circulate was meant to undermine the notion of racial inheritance and make cross-cultural affiliation, rather than race, the basis of identification.¹² While Newell’s promotion of diffusion over evolution certainly posed a challenge to the prevalent biological determinism and racial essentialism of the late nineteenth century, the implication of this theoretical orientation supported an assimilationist approach to culture, suggesting the ease with which blacks and other non-European or marginal groups could assimilate to the more civilized white Western culture. Furthermore, despite his attempts to discount evolution as an inadequate model for studying the circulation and transmission of folklore, Newell’s understanding of cultural groups was still rendered through an evolutionary schema that located groups at various stages of savagery, barbarism, semi-civilization, and civilization; in each case, white, Western culture being synonymous with civilization.

In addressing reports of Voodoo worship in Haiti, for instance, Newell took pains to show that the reports likely were overblown products of popular imagination and stereotype. He sought to trace the origins of Voodoo, not to African practices and customs, but to medieval European practices brought to Louisiana and Haiti by the French. As Newell stated, “I shall be able to make it appear: first, that the name Vaudoux, or Voodoo, is derived from a European source; secondly, that the beliefs which the word denotes are equally imported from Europe; thirdly, that the alleged sect and its supposed rites have, in all probability, no real existence, but are a product of popular imagination.” In working toward these ends, Newell linked the practices associated with Voodoo more closely to medieval European witchcraft than to what he identified as the present-day savage customs of African cannibalism. Newell supported his contention through etymology and the collection and comparative analysis of reports regarding vaudoux and witchcraft, and concluded that the “Voodoos of Hayti are identical with the devout Waldenses of Piedmont.”¹³

While Newell was unsparing in his critiques of folklorists who allowed their interpretations to be colored by their personal, political, or ideological biases, Newell’s arguments in favor of European origins for African American folklore were not unaffected by such biases. Newell believed that blacks were assimilating so rapidly to white American practices that African American customs and tales actually bore the mark of the European remnants that persisted in white American culture rather than in African traditions and practices. This contention was supported by his belief that “in almost all cases folk-thought and folk-practice are imposed by the cultured races on the more barbarous, and that very little passes from the savage to the civilized.” He continued, “I doubt whether a single instance can be cited of the adoption and assimilation, by a highly cultivated race, of any considerable body of barbarous ideas. Where two races are mixed together, as in America negroes and whites, the case is more complicated; yet here, also, the influence of the civilized part of the community is immeasurably in excess.”¹⁴ Within the context of the larger U.S. racial discourse, theories of diffusion, along with the geographic and environmental explanation for cultural similarities and differences, meant that African Americans could assimilate (and indeed had done so) to the more civilized practices and traditions of white Americans. As Cruz points out, this belief in assimilation grew out of the humanitarian reformists’ views of the previous generation, but the new social scientists interpreted this cultural metamorphosis not through the moral and political lens of the abolitionists, but through a scientistic hermeneutic emphasizing classification and categorization.¹⁵ In other words, the argument for circulation of cultural materials and the assimilation of racial groups was posed in an earlier guise, as the abolitionists and then reformists argued first for blacks’ inherent humanity and second for bl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: “By Custom and By Law”: Folklore and the Birth of Jim Crow
• 2: From Hawai‘i to Hampton: Samuel Armstrong and the Unlikely Origins of Folklore Studies at the Hampton Institute
• 3: Recovering Folklore as a Site of Resistance: Anna Julia Cooper and the Hampton Folklore Society
• 4: Uprooting the Folk: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Critique of the Folk Ideal
• 5: “The Stolen Voice”: Charles Chesnutt, Whiteness, and the Politics of Folklore
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index