Browse

When people cross the footbridge to Lewis Island in the Delaware River at Lambertville, NJ, they’re in a “whole ‘nother world”: wild and civilized, stable atop changing water and earth. Here lies the last commercial haul seine fishery on the non-tidal Delaware, where Lewis family members have netted since 1888 and have long monitored the fluctuating shad population. The island also serves as a spiritual, recreational, and community site for local and regional visitors, whom the Lewis family welcomes because of their forebear’s “mandate to share the island.” Visitors feel almost immediately that this place is special, but the why is elusive. Folklorist Charlie Groth explains Lewis Island’s unassuming cultural magic by developing the concept of “narrative stewardship,” a practice by which people take care of communal resources (in this case, river, shad, tradition, and community itself) through sharing stories. Anchored in over two decades of field research, this accessible ethnography interweaves the author’s observations as a crew member, stories from various tellers, interviews, history, and cultural theory. Beginning with thick description, the work explores four broad story types—Big Stories, character anecdotes, microlegends, and everyday storying. Groth traces how narratives intertwine with each other and with the physical environment to create sense of place, while participants in various roles navigate belonging. Ultimately, she posits the idea that in an era when telectronics have changed material conditions profoundly and quickly, echoing the way the industrial revolution led to anomie, narrative stewardship embedded in everyday life helps sustain culture and community.

In City of Islands, Dr. Tammy L. Brown uses the life stories of Caribbean intellectuals as “windows” into the dynamic history of immigration in New York and the long battle for racial equality in modern America. This is an important book because it is the first interdisciplinary, book-length study of how specific Caribbean intellectuals—Ethelred Brown, Richard B. Moore, Pearl Primus, Shirley Chisholm, and Paule Marshall, used the written, spoken and performed word in the cause of racial equality in the United States and in the Caribbean throughout the entire twentieth century. In the discipline of History, Caribbean immigrants living in the United States is surprisingly understudied. We have only four book-length historical accounts, and they only cover Caribbean contributions to the tradition of black political radicalism during the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast, City of Islands includes original analysis of sermons, speeches, poetry, short stories, novels, and choreography, to provide insights into each individual’s personality and intellectual style of self-presentation.

As a subject of study, “comfort food” is relevant to a number of scholarly disciplines, most obviously food studies, folkloristics, and anthropology, but also American culture studies, cultural studies, global and international studies, tourism, marketing, and public health. This volume explores the concept of “comfort food” primarily within a western context with examples from Atlantic Canada, Indonesia, England, and various ethnic, regional, and religious populations as well as rural and urban residents in the U.S. It includes studies of a wide range of dishes—bologna to chocolate, sweet and savory puddings, fried bread with an egg in the center, dairy products, fried rice, cafeteria fare, sugary fried dough, soul food, and others—exploring ways in which they comfort or in some instances cause discomfort and how they are connected to a sense of emotional well-being. Some essays analyze the phenomenon in daily life; others consider comfort food in the context of cookbooks, films, Internet blogs, literature, marketing, and tourism. Recognizing that what heartens one person might discomfort another, the collection is organized accordingly, from pleasant and comforting to unpleasant or discomforting food experiences. Those foods and food experiences are then related to concepts and issues such as identity, family, community, nationality, ethnicity, class, sense of place, tradition, stress, health, discomfort, guilt, betrayal, and loss, contributing to a deeper understanding of comfort food as a significant social category of human behavior.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding region in 2005, the city debated whether to press on with Mardi Gras or cancel the parades. Ultimately, they decided to proceed. New Orleans’s recovery certainly has resulted from a complex of factors, but the city’s unique cultural life—perhaps its greatest capital—has been instrumental in bringing the city back from the brink of extinction. Voicing a civic fervor, local writer Chris Rose spoke for the importance of Carnival when he argued to carry on with the celebration of Mardi Gras following Katrina: “We are still New Orleans. We are the soul of America. We embody the triumph of the human spirit. Hell. We ARE Mardi Gras”. Since 2006, a number of new Mardi Gras practices have gained prominence. The new parade organizations or krewes, as they are called, interpret and revise the city’s Carnival traditions but bring innovative practices to Mardi Gras. The history of each parade reveals the convergence of race, class, age, and gender dynamics in these new Carnival organizations. Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans examines six unique, offbeat, Downtown celebrations. Using ethnography, folklore, cultural, and performance studies, the authors analyze new Mardi Gras’s connection to traditional Mardi Gras. The narrative of each krewe’s development is fascinating and unique, illustrating participants’ shared desire to contribute to New Orleans’s rich and vibrant culture.

The complicated process of preparing the dead for burial is now the province of funeral industry professionals, but this is a recent development. Until the end of World War II, especially in rural parts of the South and documented here across the Arkansas Ozarks, members of the deceased’s community performed all of the jobs required for a burial. This was done to relieve the family but, in many places, taboos forbid their participation. This book documents death, burial and mourning customs in the Arkansas Ozarks for 1850 to 1950. It examines the traditions that governed sitting up with the sick and dying, laying out the body prior to viewing and burial, building the coffin and digging the grave. It also documents parallels between funerals and the Southern custom of Decoration Day. Preceding these subjects is an examination of the therapies, folk cures and superstitions believed to save or prolong life. Other subjects include maternal and infant mortality, obituaries, as well as the burial customs of African Americans, which generally paralleled those of whites. One chapter is devoted to disenfranchised death, deaths that could not be mourned according to tradition, such as ones occurring during epidemics and wartime. The book concludes with an examination of the ways in which, by the 1950s, the funeral industry had assumed all of the many labor-intensive jobs once performed within the community. The transition was a gradual one, but ultimately succeeded with offering of offering embalming, factory-made caskets, burial insurance and other goods and services.

In twenty-first century America, Home cooking has transformed from an overwhelming chore to a nearly avoidable pastime. This rapid disappearance of kitchen skills has led critics to lament the death of home cooking. “No one cooks anymore” is a rallying cry to get Americans back to cooking from scratch in order to improve health and increase happiness. However, this mourning for home cooking only serves to underscore its significance as a symbol of the importance of food to family, home, and community, which comes through in the rhetoric found in a variety of texts, including cookbooks, advertising, and YouTube videos. Analysis of these texts reveals that, far from dying, home cooking traditions continue as a powerful form of folklore that American fill with meaning as a representation of both the continuity of the past and the possibilities of the future.

Race and Radio: Pioneering Black Broadcasters in New Orleans explicates the emergence of blacks in broadcasting in New Orleans. The racial integration of changed the medium making it a channel for African American discourse, the music and interviews of local black musicians, and innovative black rhetoric. O.C.W. Taylor was the city's first black radio announcer. He hosted an unprecedented talk show, the “Negro Forum,” on WNOE beginning in 1946 and continuing for 22 years. Doctors, journalists, owners of funeral homes, directors of non-profits, and other professionals spoke. Clergy from various denominations discussed topics such as practical applications of Biblical stories. The guests inspired linked fate among listeners who had never heard African American voices on radio and believed they could also achieve. In 1949, listeners heard the arrival of Vernon "Dr. Daddy-O" Winslow's smooth, articulate, and disk jockey creative voice. The Fitzgerald Advertising Agency hired him to sell Jax beer to the black market using his show “Jivin’ with Jax” broadcast on WWEZ. He interviewed African American artists and played their music. After arriving from Chicago in 1953, Larry McKinley began informing blacks over WMRY of local activities of the Civil Rights Movement in the city. In 1957, he moved to WYLD which morphed into WMRY. This thick historiography situates Race and Radio within theories of racism, ideological hegemony, and marginalization, concepts explaining of why whites locked blacks out of the production and dissemination of media content.

On the southern end of the Grand Rue, a major thoroughfare that runs through the center of Port-au-Prince, waits the Haitian capital's automobile repair district. This junkyard of steel and rubber, recycled parts, old tires, and scrap metal might seem an unlikely foundry for art. Yet, on the street's opposite end thrives the Grand Rue Galerie, a working studio of assembled art and sculptures wrought from the refuse. Established by artists André Eugène and Jean Hérard Celeur in the late 1990s, the Grand Rue's urban environmental aesthetics radically challenge ideas about consumption, waste, and environmental hazards, as well as consider innovative solutions to these problems in the midst of poverty, insufficient social welfare, and lack of access to arts, education, and basic needs. This book explores the urban environmental aesthetics of the Grand Rue sculptors and the beautifully constructed sculptures they have designed from salvaged parts and materials. The book constructs an urban ecological framework for understanding these sculptures amid environmental degradation and grinding poverty. The book regards the underdeveloped cities of the global South as alternate spaces for challenging the profit-driven machinations of global capitalism. Above all, the book presents Haitian artists who live on the most challenged Caribbean island, yet who thrive as creators reinventing refuse as art and resisting the abjection of their circumstances.

The supernatural remains extraordinarily popular in literature, television, and film. But one figure has remained in the shadow, the female ghost. Inherently liminal, often literally invisible, the female ghost has nevertheless appeared in all genres. Subversive Spirits presents a history of the figure in the United States and the United Kingdom from the 1920s to the present, focusing on the female ghost in heritage sites, theatre, Hollywood film, literature, and television in the United States and the United Kingdom. What holds these disparate female ghosts together is their uncanny ability to disrupt, illuminate, and challenge gendered assumptions and roles. As with other supernatural figures, the female ghost changes over time, especially responding to changes in gender roles. Comedic female ghosts in literature and film disrupt gender norms through humor (Topper and Blithe Spirit ). Terrifying and vengeful female ghosts in England and America draw on horror and death to present a challenge to restrictions on mothers (The Woman in Black and La Llorona). The female immigrant experience and the horrors of slavery provide the focus for ghosts who expose history’s silences (The Woman Warrior and Beloved ). Heritage sites use the female ghost as a friendly and inviting but structurally subordinated narrator (The Untold Story and The Ghost of the Castle ). In the twenty-first century, the female ghost expands her influence to become a mother and savior to all humanity (Being Human , U.K. and U.S.) Subversive Spirits brings this figure into the light, exploring her cultural significance in popular culture.

Many artists draw upon folklore to craft films, music, literature, and other elements of popular culture. This book examines how the opposite phenomenon occurs: the use of popular culture in the expressive culture called folklore. Superman is an ideal focus for such as study because of his ubiquity. Though Superman is under the control of a corporation, fans nonetheless have developed a sense of ownership of him, often because of an affinity they feel toward him. Early chapters of this book explore the varieties of this affinity as experienced by individuals and as understood through interviews. Later chapters delve into specific events, such as the Superman Celebration in Illinois, and other modes of expression such as humor, personal narrative, and myth. Superman in Myth and Folklore explores the idea that a fictional character can be foundationally important in morality through fieldwork and interviews. In other words, fans use Superman to think through complex issues in their personal lives, and this book explores how. Despite the focus on fieldwork, there is some attention to the extant literature on Superman, ranging from educational works on science to psychology and history. There is also attention to the mythical aspects of Superman, with analyses of the character through several theories such as structuralism and functionalism. By examining jokes, festival, costuming, and narrative, this book explores the impact a fictional character can have.

A professional storyteller journeys to discover what it means to be a teacher and a teller of tales. Just like Jack, he traces his path from being raised on the stories of Appalachia and explores if they have a place in the classroom. However, he does not climb a beanstalk to understand this journey, but instead challenges what it means to be a teller and educator and even the definition of storytelling. As he reflects on not only his stories but his students, he changes as a storyteller, as an educator, and better understands his students in the process. Drawing from storymaking, storytelling, and dramatic methods, he revisits and finds new stories to tell.