Literature and Visual Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

In the early twentieth century, an increasingly diverse group of Russians and Americans reflected upon their changing worlds in literature and visual culture. They produced competing representations of serfs, enslaved African Americans, peasants, and freedpeople that alternately idealized and criticized the pre and post-emancipation eras. This chapter studies the work of Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Kate Chopin, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois, Anton Chekhov, and Evgenii Opochinin.

Popular Historical Fiction

During the post-emancipation era in Russia and the United States, authors created nostalgic historical fiction that romanticized Russian serfdom and American slavery. This chapter compares the short stories of white, Southern authors Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris with the mass-oriented historical fiction of Russian aristocrats Grigorii Danilevskii, Vsevolod Solov’ev, Evgenii Salias, and Evgenii Opochinin. In their literature, these privileged authors created narratives targeting middle-class readers that deliberately misrepresented the histories of slavery and serfdom during a period characterized by the acquisition of critical new rights by peasants and African Americans.

Centenario de Los cuentos de mi tía Panchita de Carmen Lyra (1920 – 2020): contexto educativo, literario y político de la primera edición de una obra

En el año 2020 se conmemoran cien años de la publicación del libro Los cuentos de mi tía Panchita, escrito por Carmen Lyra y editado por Joaquín García Monge. En este ensayo se presenta la descripción de algunas condiciones educativas, literarias y políticas las cuales caracterizaron la época de su primera edición y que permitieron se difundiera una obra dedicada a la niñez, donde se recopilaban cuentos populares recogidos en Costa Rica. Se destaca la importancia que se dio al folclor, la injerencia de la publicación de la revista San Selerín, la fundación de la Cátedra de Literatura Infantil en la Escuela Normal y el papel que desempeñó la autora en los movimientos sociales que provocaron la caída de la dictadura de los hermanos Tinoco. Se evidencia que esta colección de cuentos contiene recreaciones de argumentos que fueron aportados, previamente, por Fernán Caballero en España y Joel Chandler Harris en Estados Unidos. También se estudian otras fuentes como los cuentos populares españoles recopilados por Antonio Rodríguez Almodóvar. Aún en el siglo XXI, Los cuentos de mi tía Panchita puede ser considerado como un libro políticamente incorrecto pues hace uso de construcciones gramaticales y léxico que personas conservadoras podrían considerar inapropiadas para la niñez. Es una obra que refleja el afán por difundir las culturas populares y que representa las posturas vanguardistas de su escritora y editor.

Hidden Voices and Gothic Undertones: Slavery and Folklore of the American South

African American folklore embodies themes of the Tropical Gothic. It has an air of mystery as it has a deeper meaning underneath the different layers of plot. Folklore of the American South represents the darkness of the slavery period and its implications for African Americans. This article discusses two folklore collections: Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk lore of the Old Plantation by Joel Chandler Harris, and From My People: 400 Years of Folklore by Daryl Cumber Dance. Both collections illuminate the ways in which West African oral tradition became a source of empowerment, courage and wisdom for the enslaved African Americans. Folk stories served as a means of silent resistance and preserved the cultural heritage of African Americans.

The Mammies and Uncles of the South: The Subversive Tales of Joel Chandler Harris and Kate Chopin

The aim of this essay is to look at Southern racism from a different perspective, namely the subversive influence of the black uncles and mammies, depicted as kind, loyal and caring, in the racial education of the white Southern children. However, these narrators, though meant to comply with the racist requirements of their masters, take control of the stories and, with caution and dissimulation, attempt to educate the children they care for towards a more tolerant outlook on race. The dangers of such an endeavor, especially at the height of segregation and racial violence at the end of the nineteenth century (in the post-Reconstruction South), are evident in the ambiguous critical reception of Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus stories and Kate Chopin’s writings, the authors chosen for analysis. Oscillating from a belief in their compliance to their age’s prejudices and codes and a trust in their rebellious attitudes, critics and readers reacted to these stories in different, even contradictory manners. Our intention is to demonstrate that the use of the slave narrator is a subversive way of teaching the white child the truth about the plight of slavery and sway him/her into a more empathic attitude towards racial and class difference.

The Tar Baby

Perhaps the best-known version of the tar baby story was published in 1880 by Joel Chandler Harris in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, and popularized in Song of the South, the 1946 Disney movie. Other versions of the story, however, have surfaced in many other places throughout the world, including Nigeria, Brazil, Corsica, Jamaica, India, and the Philippines. This book offers a fresh analysis of this deceptively simple story about a fox, a rabbit, and a doll made of tar and turpentine, tracing its history and its connections to slavery, colonialism, and global trade. The book explores how the tar baby story, thought to have originated in Africa, came to exist in hundreds of forms on five continents. Examining its variation, reception, and dispersal over time, the book argues that the story is best understood not merely as a folktale but as a collective work in political philosophy. Circulating at the same time and in the same places as new ideas about property and politics developed in colonial law and political economy, the tar baby comes to embody an understanding of the interlocking processes by which custom was criminalized, slaves were captured, and labor was bought and sold. The book concludes with twelve versions of the story transcribed from various cultures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Canción do Sur, ou como Disney transformou ao tío Remus no tío Tom

Na nómina de películas de Disney hai unha que chama especialmente a atención: Canción do Sur, que a compañía ten prohibida por racista. Esta adaptou os libros de Joel Chandler Harris nos que un escravo, o tío Remus, lle conta ao fillo da súa ama unhas fábulas animadas. O protagonista destas é Brer Rabbit, mito entre a poboación negra, a cal tiraba ensinanzas deste coello avezado que por medio do enxeño vence aos seus inimigos. Porén, na adaptación ao cinema, Remus, que nos libros goza dunha posición privilexiada na plantación e incluso ostenta certa autoridade, é un home dócil e sumiso, que só busca a felicidade dos seus patróns, e as fábulas dos animais aparecen despoxadas desa lectura subversiva.