Theorizing Folklore from the Margins: Critical and Ethical Approaches

by Solimar Otero (Editor), Mintzi Auanda Mart nez-Rivera (Editor), Rachel V. Gonz lez-Martin (Contribution by), Juan Eduardo Wolf (Contribution by), Miriam Melton-Villanueva (Contribution by)

Overview

The study of folklore has historically focused on the daily life and culture of regular people, such as artisans, storytellers, and craftspeople. But what can folklore reveal about strategies of belonging, survival, and reinvention in moments of crisis?

The experience of living in hostile conditions for cultural, social, political, or economic reasons has redefined communities in crisis. The curated works in Theorizing Folklore from the Margins offer clear and feasible suggestions for how to ethically engage in the study of folklore with marginalized populations. By focusing on issues of critical race and ethnic studies, decolonial and antioppressive methodologies, and gender and sexuality studies, contributors employ a wide variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches. In doing so, they reflect the transdisciplinary possibilities of Folklore studies.

By bridging the gap between theory and practice, Theorizing Folklore from the Margins confirms that engaging with oppressed communities is not only relevant, but necessary.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253056078
Publisher:	Indiana University Press (Ips)
Publication date:	06/15/2021
Series:	Activist Encounters in Folklore and Ethnomusicology
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Solimar Otero is Professor of Folklore in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. She is author of Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures and of Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World. She is editor (with Toyin Falola) of Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas. Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Providence College. She has published articles on the indigenous rock movement in Mexico, indigenous popular culture, and the use of food as decorations.

Table of Contents

Part I: Critical Paths
Introduction: How does Folklore find its voice in the 21st century? An offering/invitation from the margins
1. White Traditioning and Bruja Epistemologies: Rebuilding the House of USAmerican Folklore Studies
2. Un Tumbe Ch'ixi: Incorporating Afro-descendant Ideas into an Andean Anti-Colonial Methodology
3. Disrupting the Archive
Part II: Framing the Narrative
4. Afrolatinx Folklore and Visual Representation: Interstices and Anti-Authenticity
5. Behaving Like Relatives: Or we don't sit around and talk about politics with strangers
6. Political Protest, Ideology, and Social Criticism in Wolof Folk Poetry
7. Sugar Cane Alley: Teaching the Concept of "Group" from a Critical Folkloristics Perspective
8. movimiento armado/armed movement
Part III: Visualizing the Present
9. Ni lacras, ni lesbianas normalizadas: Trauma, matrimonio, conectividad y representación audiovisual para la comunidad lesbiana en Cuba
10. "¿Batata? ¡Batata!": Examining Puerto Rican Visual Folk Expression in Times of Adversities
11. Forming Strands and Ties in the Knotted Atlantic: Methodologies of Color and Practice of Beadwork in Lukumí Religion
12. Of Blithe Spirits: Narratives of Rebellion, Violence, and Cosmic Memory in Haitian Vodou
Part IV: Placing Community
13. "No one would believe us": An Auto-Ethnography of Conducting Fieldwork in a Conflict
14. "La Sierra Juárez en Riverside": The Inaugural Oaxacan Philharmonic Bands Audition on a university campus
15. Hidden thoughts and exposed bodies: art, everyday life, and queering Cuban masculinities
16. Complexifying Identity through Disability: Critical Folkloristic Perspectives on Being a Parent and Experiencing Illness & Disability through My Child
Index

What People are Saying About This

David Todd Lawrence

Theorizing Folklore from the Margins is the book I have wanted since the moment I first learned folklore was a thing. Solimar Otero and Mintzi Martinez-Rivera have assembled a collection that does more than reposition BIPOC theorizing from the margins to the center; it demonstrates that our theory has always been central to a more historically aware, self-critical, and ethically grounded folklore project. Further, this book shows us that the contributions of marginalized communities to critical theoretical conversations are not new. This book, then, is a bridge between the past, present, and future of a renewed Folklore studies in which those once silenced voices demand and deserve a new audience.

Guillermo De Los Reyes

Theorizing Folklore from the Margins is an innovative collection of essays that maps the future of Folklore studies. This volume is indeed an important, relevant, ground-breaking contribution to Folklore scholarship. The polyphony of voices that composes Theorizing Folklore from the Margins argues that it is necessary to study the ways in which the creators of folk culture utilize their cultural production and expressions that allow them to create safe spaces that eventually become spaces for liberation and understanding of elements such as race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, (dis)ability, and national identity. 

Wanda Addison

Theorizing Folklore from the Margins actively resists monolithic notions attached to cultures and groups through a collection of powerful, multi-authored chapters and "proposes, invites, and offers alternative paths" in folklore studies. This stellar, thought-provoking volume reminds us authority rests with the voices of the people positioned at the margins and that the margins are alive con poder y cultura (with power and culture) and thriving because of it.

Editorial Reviews

"Theorizing Folklore from the Margins is an innovative collection of essays that maps the future of Folklore studies. This volume is indeed an important, relevant, ground-breaking contribution to Folklore scholarship. The polyphony of voices that composes Theorizing Folklore from the Margins argues that it is necessary to study the ways in which the creators of folk culture utilize their cultural production and expressions that allow them to create safe spaces that eventually become spaces for liberation and understanding of elements such as race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, (dis)ability, and national identity."—Guillermo De Los Reyes, Editor of Gender, Sexuality, and Policy; and author of Getting the Third Degree: Fraternalism, Freemasonry, and History, University of Houston

"Theorizing Folklore from the Margins actively resists monolithic notions attached to cultures and groups through a collection of powerful, multi-authored chapters and "proposes, invites, and offers alternative paths" in folklore studies. This stellar, thought-provoking volume reminds us authority rests with the voices of the people positioned at the margins and that the margins are alive con poder y cultura (with power and culture) and thriving because of it."—Wanda Addison, Professor, Department of Arts and Humanities, National University

"Theorizing Folklore from the Margins is the book I have wanted since the moment I first learned folklore was a thing. Solimar Otero and Mintzi Martinez-Rivera have assembled a collection that does more than reposition BIPOC theorizing from the margins to the center; it demonstrates that our theory has always been central to a more historically aware, self-critical, and ethically grounded folklore project. Further, this book shows us that the contributions of marginalized communities to critical theoretical conversations are not new. This book, then, is a bridge between the past, present, and future of a renewed Folklore studies in which those once silenced voices demand and deserve a new audience."—David Todd Lawrence, coauthor of When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri, University of St. Thomas

"This powerful collection of 16 critical essays takes aim at the myriad forms in whichhate, violence, othering, disenfranchisement, etc., manifest in social life as the resultof dominant power structures supported by the "legacies of white supremacy,homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, ableism, and other injustices and forms ofdiscrimination" (19). It is these power structures, among others, that have keptcertain individuals and communities at the margins. The "margins," as presented in thebook, vary by author and range from the physical (such as prisons) to the symbolic (asin the intersections between methodologies and ideas). . . . The result is an illuminating, moving, and reflexivity-inducing work that takes us into and through very different marginal worlds "among, and with, Mexican, Wolof, Native American, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Haitian, Martinican, Andean, North American, African Diaspora, and LGBTQI folk cultures and communities"(13)."—Julián Antonio Carrillo, University of New Mexico, Journal of Folklore and Education

From the Publisher

Fifty years from now, when scholars look back at the most important contributions to folklore studies in the early twenty-first century, Solimar Otero and Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera's edited volume Theorizing Folklore from the Margins: Critical and Ethical Approaches will rank extremely high. Its publication is a watershed event, one that signals the unapologetic maturation of a critical turn in the discipline. . . . Thanks to the outstanding efforts of Martínez-Rivera, Otero, all the contributors to this volume, and all their intellectual ancestors, the critical turn in folklore studies has arrived. We should all be grateful.

Journal of Folklore Research - Stephen Olbrys Gencarella

This powerful collection of 16 critical essays takes aim at the myriad forms in whichhate, violence, othering, disenfranchisement, etc., manifest in social life as the resultof dominant power structures supported by the "legacies of white supremacy,homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, ableism, and other injustices and forms ofdiscrimination" (19). It is these power structures, among others, that have keptcertain individuals and communities at the margins. The "margins," as presented in thebook, vary by author and range from the physical (such as prisons) to the symbolic (asin the intersections between methodologies and ideas). . . . The result is an illuminating, moving, and reflexivity-inducing work that takes us into and through very different marginal worlds "among, and with, Mexican, Wolof, Native American, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Haitian, Martinican, Andean, North American, African Diaspora, and LGBTQI folk cultures and communities"(13).

Journal of Folklore and Education - Julián Antonio Carrillo