Zobel Marshall’s book, a follow-up to her study of the African folktale character, Anansi, is an uneven collection of literary analyses related to the published work of Joel Chandler Harris, whose Uncle Remus Stories continue to reverberate in literary and cultural settings nearly 175 years since their journalistic authorship. The book contains considerable scholarly information, although little of it attributable to the author, but nevertheless provides an in-print title that may assist contemporary students in finding their way through the briar patch of Harris research.
Alas, this orientation does not come without a cost. It is identified in Marshall’s book with the very first word in her book’s subtitle, “trauma,” which also provides the most concise summary of the book’s contents: “The African American authors examined here, through imbuing their characters and narratives with trickster qualities, challenge damaging racial stereotypes engendered by earlier white adaptations of black folk narratives” (13). This, one gathers, is the author’s position on trauma, further condensed in a jacket blurb by John Agard, who refers to the trickster figure as a “healing gateway out of the crippling cycle of trans-Atlantic trauma.”
But fear not. There is sufficient attention to “tradition” to warrant folklorists’ attention to this slim (167-page) volume, albeit absent any careful reading of the African-American tales Joel Chandler Harris gathered in Georgia just before the Civil War. Such prominent folklorists as Roger Abrahams, Daniel Crowley, Richard Dorson, and Alan Dundes have done this work and are prominently cited. The author also includes a vital description of the folktale research conducted under the auspices of the Hampton Institute at the turn of the nineteenth century. But Brer Rabbit and tricksters in general are given relatively short shrift in order to make room for literary analyses of trauma.
The more significant problem with American Trickster is its author’s disinterest and/or unfamiliarity with important differences between the international trickster figures which contribute to world literature and the story of Brer Rabbit in America, ably told by scores of scholars, most prominently Stella Brewer Brookes. Brookes’s research was published without prejudice in 1950, and for better or worse claimed Joel Chandler Harris to be a folklorist. Arguments over the relative value of Harris’s interview questions and his race will continue to matter to folklorists and scholars of other disciplines, but all interested parties might agree that the presence of Brer Rabbit in American culture continues to grow in unexpected ways.
For example, Marshall gives passing attention to Song of the South, the Disney company film that was shown to huge American audiences in multiple theatrical tours, and also generated huge demonstrations that succeeded in stopping its twenty-fifth anniversary tour in 1971. More people likely saw Brer Rabbit in the dioramas that distracted riders waiting their turn at the Splash Mountain ride in the two American Disney theme parks than ever saw Song of the South. Home-viewing versions of the movie have been pulled from all Disney inventories, but it is available as a Japanese laser disk. Is this a trickster ploy to keep the rabbit alive? Or might we look to the circle of statues at the American Disney parks that surround the central sculptural image of Walt Disney himself. One of the eight, among Pinocchio, Donald Duck, Goofy, and others, is Brer Rabbit.
My point is not that Brer Rabbit is now wholly owned by the Disney Corporation, but rather, that from his earliest appearance in the pages of the Atlanta Constitution this shape-shifter has continued to stretch his identity in ways that are not limited to the literary. Brer Rabbit’s elasticity as a character is matched by his elasticity as a cultural presence. And we have not even raised the question which may be key: Why a rabbit?
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[Review length: 623 words • Review posted on November 19, 2021]