In Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation, Shirley Moody-Turner critically examines the intersection of black folklore and racial identity in the United States during the late-nineteenth century. Moody-Turner, a professor of English at Penn State, centers her study on the work of the Hampton Folklore Society at the Hampton Institute, whose contributors used black folklore to counter racist academic and popular culture discourses as well as to construct a self-defined racial identity. In doing so, she hopes to offer an “alternative genealogy through which to approach both African American folklore studies and African American literary engagements with folklore” (4).
Moody-Turner carries out her aim over the course of six well-researched and well-written chapters. In chapter 1, the author argues that early American folklorists’ adoption of a scientific approach to the study of black folklore contributed to the misrepresentation of African American identity and experience within America’s cultural imagination. Chapter 2 centers on the beginnings of folklore studies at the Hampton Institute. In the first part, the author compellingly posits that Hampton Institute founder Samuel Armstrong’s early folklore efforts at the school were driven by his assimilationist approach to African American uplift. Armstrong viewed black folklore, superstition, and religion in particular, as markers of primitiveness and therefore hindrances to full assimilation into American society, and sought to eradicate them from African American life. The second part of the chapter details Hampton professor Alice Bacon’s formation of the Hampton Folklore Society and her scientific approach to the study of black folklore.
Chapter 3 is the strongest in the book and extends the previous chapters’ discussion with an exploration of the ways in which contributors to the Hampton Folklore Society resisted the assimilationist ideology of the Hampton Institute as well as the essentializing scientific methods propagated by Bacon and the American Folklore Society through their inclusive approach to preservation and a theoretical focus on folklore’s role in African American life. She devotes significant attention to noted African American author, educator, and Hampton Folklore Society affiliate Anna Julia Cooper, whose work critiqued the racism and classism informing early studies of black folklore, offered an alternative methodology for examining black folklore, and cited black folklore as a source of a distinctively African American literary tradition.
In chapters 4 and 5, Moody-Turner focuses on the efforts of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt, two African American literary titans who championed southern black folklore in their works. The author closes out the book by tracing the influence of black folklore on African American literature throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation is a superb examination of the impact of black folklore on African American literature and identity in the nineteenth century. Shirley Moody-Turner accomplishes her goal of illuminating black scholars’ and writers’ employment of folklore in their push for African American self-definition and self-representation. With its detailed and engaging narrative, the book will be an enjoyable and intellectually stimulating read for those interested in African American folklore, literature, and history as well as the racial politics of folklore studies.
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[Review length: 510 words • Review posted on April 22, 2015]