Introduction: Critical Race Theory and African American Folklore

Our purpose in assembling this collection of articles was to document the current state of scholarship on African American folklore from an interdisciplinary perspective that includes literary, popular culture, and folklore studies, as well as anthropology and other social sciences. Contemporary folklore studies is itself an amalgam of literary and social science approaches as illustrated by the presence of folklorists in Anthropology, English, Comparative Studies, Middle Eastern, African Studies, and other language and literature and social science departments. Critical race theory has had a profound influence on all these disciplines since its inception in the late 80s and early 90s and is basic to every article in this collection even if not mentioned directly. These studies are part of a broader theoretical approach to culture and society that focuses on the social construction of race which often reflects misconceptions about the relationship between biology and culture (for more on the principles and history of critical race theory see the essay by Mary A. Seliger in this issue). The organization of this special issue is based on the wide range of cultural expressions covered in the essays. We start with popular culture sources, specifically the television shows and films of black comics Chris Rock and Dave Chapelle which are the focus of Constance Bailey's "Fight the Power: African American Humor as a Discourse of Resistance"; then we go on to contemporary films and journalism that depict cultural images of "the crack mother" in Tracy R. Carpenter's "Construction of the Crack Mother Icon." Both studies have a decidedly political focus. The next article shifts to an examination of orally told personal narratives from contemporary folklore fieldwork by Sheila Bock in "Toward a Performance Approach to African American Personal Narratives about Diabetes." The folklore fieldwork theme continues in the next two essays with historical examples in which a white and a black anthropologist are emphasized: the fieldwork of Alan Lomax is critiqued in Aaron N. Oforlea's "[Un] veiling the Blues: Revealing Self and Other in The Land Where the Blues Begins," and fieldwork by Zora Neale Hurston in Cynthia Ward's "Truth, Lies, Mules and Men: Through the 'Spy-glass of Anthropology,' and What Zora Neale Hurston Saw There." The last two essays are studies of literary works written by African American authors: Mary A. Seliger's "Dessa's Blues: Reimagining the Master's Narrative in Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose, and Donald M. Shaffer Jr.'s "African American Folklore as Racial Project in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman." The connection between these broad and varied topics is that they are all about cultural representations of race whether from an African American or European American perspective that are then deconstructed in ways that are grounded in critical race theory. Several of the articles also investigate the intellectual history of African American folklore studies by scholars from diverse backgrounds and with a variety of concerns that did not always advance African American interests. The authors in this issue break with that scholarly tradition by seeking to illuminate the complexity of African American culture, people, and creative expressions in oral, written, and visual texts. There are other connections between the essays in terms of their analytic purposes. Donald Shaffer's exploration of Chesnutt's racial project, Aaron Oforlea's application of Fanonian dialectics to Lomax's ethnography, and Tracy Carpenter's examination of negative stereotypes and political agendas highlight how African American folklore has been used by the dominant culture to reaffirm white identity and subjectivity, and to define African American culture as hypersexual, primitive, and co-dependent. Articles by Constance Bailey, Cynthia Ward, Shelia Bock, and Mary Seliger demonstrate the role of language in representing racial experiences in society and how racialized language functions in hegemonic ways across different modes of communication. …