Professional Documents
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Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: Folklore, Folkloristics, and African American Literary
Criticism
Author(s): Sw. Anand Prahlad
Reviewed work(s):
Source: African American Review, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 565-575
Published by: Indiana State University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2901337 .
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565
566
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n the main, African American liter- and aesthetics of the group, not reallife processes, strategies, or dynamics
ary criticism has as yet posed no
so deeply embedded in individual lives
serious challenge to the foundations
upon which Western academic "relithat they cannot be readily extracted.
gion" rests. In spite of the trend toward This idealization and romanticization
the use of folklore as a basis for theory of the "folk" serves as the basis for
(see Baker, Long, Blues; Gates; Harris), some academicians' self-constructed
the Eurocentric conceptual framework mythology and identity politics. Baker
writes of the blues, for
within which these theories
are formulated remains the
example, that "what
Such
emerges is not a filled subsame. As I have noted, this
suggestions
framework dictates a hierject, but an anonymous
(nameless) voice issuing
archal relationship between
as I have
from the black (w)hole"
forms and classes. My point
here is not to encourage the
(Blues 5).
discussed
Baker's comment reprecreation of a new literary
could form sents what historically has
" denominati
on"-e . g.,
Afrocentrism or Africana the basis for a been, and remains, the prevailing viewpoint of acadeWomanism-but instead to
revolutionary micians. From this outdatsuggest how far-reaching
ed perspective, "folklore"
and complex the pursuit of
kind of
and "the folk" are mystifolklore is; in fact, it is a
fied, and a focus is placed
much larger and more funliterary
on the group's regurgitadamental
phenomenon
criticism.
tion and transmission of
than are literature and
"lore" that has life indepenThe
of
academe.
discourse
literary critics concerned with folklore dent of any individual. Literary scholis comparable to writing about history ars write about "Black," "Negro," or
as if historians and their research were "African American" blues, spirituals,
somehow outside of the subject of their or other traditions in the same way that
historians write about "Black" histoscrutiny. Or, as the Zen proverb goes,
"The fish in the water cannot see that
ry-indeed, as folklorists wrote about
they are wet." For literary scholars sim- the folk in the late-nineteenth and
ply to acknowledge the influence of
early-twentieth centuries. Lest scholars
forget, this way of conceptualizing and
folklore on their own thinking,
research methodologies, and analysis
writing about African Americans is
born out of political rhetoric, a testimowould undermine the conventional
way of approaching literature and shift ny to the historical struggle for civil libradically the nature of the field.
erties, equality, and dignity. Its focus is
The impulse toward a political use on the African American experience as
of folklore by critics is'another possible a singular, monolithic phenomenon,
reason to eschew folkloristic and other rather than on widely diverse particuethnography-oriented studies. Because larities of experience, revolving around
contemporary folklore research tends
a central historical matrix.
to focus more on the diversity of indiFrom this homogeneous point of
vidual taste and innovation than on the view, the folk constitute a mass conhomogeneous taste of the "masses," it
sciousness and mind, the straw out of
may be at variance with the agendas of which the gold of lore is spun. But this
Darwinian perspective retards the
some literary critics. The agendas of
identification of and research on specifwhich I speak seek to position critics
ic "folk" artists and disguises an ignoand selected writers as spokespersons
for the "masses." Folklore becomes for rance of African American culture with
these scholars symbolic and historic
scholarly rhetoric. It implicitly equates
representations of the consciousness
folk with traditional, denying the
568
569
570
571
572
Notes
2. For example, Daryl C. Dance's 1978 collection Shuckin' and Jivin. Folklore from Contemporary
573
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