African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 677
unconditionally (Williams 1994). Richard Wright accused her of “the minstrel technique
that makes ‘white folks’ laugh” (1993, 17). Hurston’s work appeared in the wake of the
popularity of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, and, misrecognizing her style, critics
drew an unfortunate connection between the two (see Moon 1993, 10, and Gannett 1993,
11).
However, the emerging field of performance studies is moving closer to Hurston’s
model of performance as both an interactive method for research and a subject of study.
Hurston’s interactive approach to folklore did not freeze tales on the printed page as
bounded objects of study. She understood the intersubjective, intertextual, and
intergeneric practices at the heart of African American mimicry and parody, and she also
used and played on these relations in her own theatrical and written work. She already
knew what Olabiyi Yai understood and advocated in 1989, that “from the point of view
of oral poetics, oral poetry strictly speaking should not even be described. We know it by
practicing it and by contributing to its making” (Yai 1989, 68). As a bearer of African-
American tradition herself, Hurston was true to the practice. She did not describe or
explicitly analyze so much as she practiced her embodied knowledge of oral poetics,
albeit in written form through her translations, but she also contributed to its making (in
Yai’s sense) by restaging it in both literary and theatrical forms for broader audiences.
Hurston’s participatory practice in the study of folklore, no doubt based on her first-hand
experience of it from childhood, gave her access to the processes of its production, which
enabled her to subvert the objectivist bias in folklore. As D.A. Boxwell put it.
According to [objectivist] standards, Mules and Men, with its highly
visible, intensely subjective, and active narrator and distinctly felt “author
image,” appears to be a willful violation of long-held and persistent
attitudes to socialscientific writing. Yet it is now possible, I think, to view
Hurston’s work as a striking prefiguration of theories articulated in
Clifford Geertz’s recent writings about the limitations of Boasian attitudes
toward ethnography. (1992, 607)
It is also this very unconventional practice, and the impact of the legacy of objectivism on
contemporary folklore, that all too easily allows Hurston to be consistently ignored as the
quintessential folklorist employing performance theory. For, while she set out to translate
storytelling into literature, her mode of presentation documented the ongoing processes of
communal interactions as performance.
References
Bakhtin, Mikail. 1968. Rabelais and His World. Tr. Helen Iswolski. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
——. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. M.Holquist. Tr. Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Barber, Karin. 1987. Popular Arts in Africa. African Studies Review 3, no. 3:1–78.
Bateson, Gregory. 1958. Naven. 2d ed. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
——. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. San Francisco: Chandler.
Bauman, Richard. 1977. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, 111.: Waveland.