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Even as their nations and cultures were being destroyed by colonial expansion across the continent, American Indians became a form of entertainment, sometimes dangerous and violent, sometimes primitive and noble. Creating a fictional wild west, entrepreneurs then exported it around the world. Exhibitions by George Catlin, paintings by Charles King, and Wild West shows by Buffalo Bill Cody were viewed by millions worldwide. Norman Denzin uses a series of performance pieces with historical, contemporary, and fictitious characters to provide a cultural critique of how this version of Indians, one that existed only in the western imagination, was commodified and sold to a global audience. He then calls for a rewriting of the history of the American west, one devoid of minstrelsy and racist pageantry, and honoring the contemporary cultural and artistic visions of people whose ancestors were shattered by American expansionism.

To many Native American cultures, songs and stories are dramatic enactments of reality, and words bring reality into existence. In this chapter from his award-winning book,The Anguish of Snails, Toelken thoughtfully approaches a number of stories from Native American traditions, discussing how narratives can be touchstones of shared values among closely associated traditional people and how songs and stories go far beyond an evening's entertainment or \"lessons\" about life. A traditional narrative can be a culturally structured way of thinking and of experiencing the patterns that make culture real.

Thejali--a member of a hereditary group of Mandinka professional performers--is a charismatic but contradictory figure. He is at once the repository of his people's history, the voice of contemporary political authority, the inspiration for African American dreams of an African homeland, and the chief entertainment for the burgeoning transnational tourist industry. Numerous journalists, scholars, politicians, and culture aficionados have tried to pin him down. This book shows how the jali's talents at performance make him a genius at representation--the ideal figure to tell us about the \"Africa\" that the world imagines, which is always a thing of illusion, magic, and contradiction. Africa often enters the global imagination through news accounts of ethnic war, famine, and despotic political regimes. Those interested in countering such dystopic images--be they cultural nationalists in the African diaspora or connoisseurs of \"global culture\"--often found their representations of an emancipatory Africa on an enthusiasm for West African popular culture and performance arts. Based on extensive field research in The Gambia and focusing on the figure of the jali, Performing Africa interrogates these representations together with their cultural and political implications. It explores how Africa is produced, circulated, and consumed through performance and how encounters through performance create the place of Africa in the world. Innovative and discerning, Performing Africa is a provocative contribution to debates over cultural nationalism and the construction of identity and history in Africa and elsewhere.

After a career working and living with American Indians and studying their traditions, Barre Toelken has written this sweeping study of Native American folklore in the West. Within a framework of performance theory, cultural worldview, and collaborative research, he examines Native American visual arts, dance, oral tradition (story and song), humor, and patterns of thinking and discovery to demonstrate what can be gleaned from Indian traditions by Natives and non-Natives alike. In the process he considers popular distortions of Indian beliefs, demystifies many traditions by showing how they can be comprehended within their cultural contexts, considers why some aspects of Native American life are not meant to be understood by or shared with outsiders, and emphasizes how much can be learned through sensitivity to and awareness of cultural values.Winner of the 2004 Chicago Folklore Prize,The Anguish of Snailsis an essential work for the collection of any serious reader in folklore or Native American studies.

Desi Divas: Activism in South Asian American Cultural Performancesis the product of five years of field research with progressive activists associated with the School for Indian Languages and Cultures (SILC), South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), the feminist dance collective Post Natyam, and the grassroots feminist political organization South Asian Sisters. Christine L. Garlough explores how traditional cultural forms may be critically appropriated by marginalized groups and used as rhetorical tools to promote deliberation and debate, spur understanding and connection, broaden political engagement, and advance particular social identities. Within this framework she examines how these performance activists advocate a political commitment to both justice and care, to both deliberative discussion and deeper understanding. To consider how this might happen in diasporic performance contexts, Garlough weaves together two lines of thinking. One grows from feminist theory and draws upon a core literature concerning the ethics of care. The other comes from rhetoric, philosophy, and political science literature on recognition and acknowledgment. This dual approach is used to reflect upon South Asian American women's performances that address pressing social problems related to gender inequality, immigration rights, ethnic stereotyping, hate crimes, and religious violence. Case study chapters address the relatively unknown history of South Asian American rhetorical performances from the early 1800s to the present. Avant-garde feminist performances by the Post Natyam dance collective appropriate women's folk practices and Hindu goddess figures make rhetorical claims about hate crimes against South Asian Americans after 9/11. InYoni ki Bat(a South Asian American version ofThe Vagina Monologues) a progressive performer transforms aspects of the Mahabharata narrative to address issues of sexual violence, such as incest and rape. Throughout the volume, Garlough argues that these performers rely on calls for acknowledgment that intertwine calls for justice and care. That is, they embed their testimony in traditional cultural forms to invite interest, reflection, and connection.

A half-century ago, Dan Ben-Amos decried the incongruity between what he called localized “ethnic genres” and analytical categories constructed by scholars. He called attention to native cultural expressions in their context. I suggest that balut-eating contests cannot be categorized simply with the analytical category of a festival game or a competitive-eating contest. Instead, it should be seen as a localized genre which communicates Filipino Americans’ experiences and opposes the denigration of their cultural practices.

The storytelling tradition has long been an important piece of Kentucky history and culture. Folktales, legends, tall tales, and ghost stories hold a special place in the imaginations of inventive storytellers and captive listeners. InKentucky Folktales: Revealing Stories, Truths, and Outright LiesKentucky storyteller Mary Hamilton narrates a range of stories with the voice and creativity only a master storyteller can evoke. Hamilton has perfected the art of entrancing an audience no matter the subject of her tales.Kentucky Folktalesincludes stories about Daniel Boone's ability to single-handedly kill a bear, a daughter who saves her father's land by outsmarting the king, and a girl who uses gingerbread to exact revenge on her evil stepmother, among many others. Hamilton ends each story with personal notes on important details of her storytelling craft, such as where she first heard the story, how it evolved through frequent re-tellings and reactions from audiences, and where the stories take place. Featuring tales and legends from all over the Bluegrass State,Kentucky Folktalescaptures the expression of Kentucky's storytelling tradition.

American Folklore consists of traditional knowledge and cultural practices engaged by inhabitants of the United States below Canada and above Mexico. American folklorists were influenced by nineteenth-century European humanistic scholarship that identified in traditional stories, songs, and speech among lower class peasants an artistic quality and claim to cultural nationalism. The United States, however, appeared to lack a peasant class and shared racial and ethnic stock associated in European perceptions with the production of folklore. The United States was a relatively young nation, compared to the ancient legacies of European kingdoms, and geographically the country’s boundaries had moved since its inception to include an assortment of landscapes and peoples. Popularly, folklore in the United States is rhetorically used to refer to the veracity, and significance, of cultural knowledge in an uncertain, rapidly changing, individualistic society. It frequently refers to the expressions of this knowledge in story, song, speech, custom, and craft as meaningful for what it conveys and enacts about tradition in a future-oriented country. The essay provides the argument that folklore studies in the United States challenge Euro-centered humanistic legacies by emphasizing patterns associated with the American experience that are (1) democratic, (2) vernacular, and (3) incipient.

South Africa is currently considered the epicenter of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, but it has also witnessed several other disease epidemics in the past, such as smallpox, which plagued the region for nearly two centuries between 1713 and the late nineteenth century, and the 1918 influenza outbreak. This article, which is based on archival and ethnographic study, is a historiography of music in times of epidemics in South Africa. It offers a perspective on how persistent sociocultural conditions can account for regularities in people's responses to disease. In juxtaposing case studies of musical responses to historical smallpox and influenza epidemics with the current use of music in the context of HIV/AIDS, this article explores the meanings that people make of their experiences of diseases. By positing a close reading of the song examples, it suggests that sociocultural factors such as race and ethnicity, economics and spirituality, comprise important frameworks for constructing meanings around the issue of health and in the context of epidemics.

Why do conservatives tell stories? Because it helps them win elections and assail liberal policies like health care reform and economic stimulus. \"Why\" is important, but the \"what\" and the \"how\" behind the stories that conservatives tell are equally interesting, and in this new book, David Ricci reveals all. He shows how conservative activists and candidates tell many tales that come together to project a large-scale story; a cultural narrative; a vision of what America is and what it should do to prosper socially, economically, and politically. Liberals, by contrast, tend to look for theories rather than stories, for mathematical explanations rather than theological axioms, for data rather than anecdotes, and for statistics rather than homilies. The difference is paradoxical. Liberals are unlikely to fashion sweeping narratives that capture the public s attention and commitment. Yet conservatives may tell attractive stories like the ones that got us into Iraq that momentarily capture voter support but end up costing the country more than it can afford.\"