April 12, 2010

Elizabeth Tucker. Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Legends
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Elizabeth Tucker. Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

Jeffrey Tolbert
Indiana University

Popular volumes dedicated to ghosts and the supernatural typically consist of little more than anthologies of ghastly tales, divorced from the contexts in which they are told and presented uncritically as sources of frightening entertainment. This pattern echoes a broader trend of popular engagement with folkloric material, a textual obsession characteristic of earlier days of folklore studies that contrasts starkly with contemporary scholarly attitudes toward folklore, which focus on such concepts as context, performance, and other theoretical issues that deemphasize the bounded text.

In Haunted Halls, Elizabeth Tucker presents a collection of ghost stories gathered from American college students through interviews and emails. Unlike many popular anthologies, Tucker makes an appreciable effort to position each tale within a broad context (US college campuses), to elaborate on the history surrounding many of the stories, and to provide some commentary on the social and cultural implications of the tales. (more…)

 

April 5, 2010

Negotiations in Performance: The Storytelling Performance of Two Adolescent Afghan Narrators

Posted by folkpub under Central Asia, Identity, Jokes, Performance
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Negotiations in Performance: The Storytelling Performances of Two Adolescent Afghan Narrators

Benjamin Gatling
The Ohio State University

Abstract:

This paper examines the storytelling performance of two adolescent male Afghan narrators.  In the summer of 1976, the two narrators, Jalaludin and Mohammed Asef, sat down with Margaret Mills and her tape recorder in Kabul, Afghanistan.  Their performance encompassed items across the spectrum of oral, Persian fictive genres, from conventional stories similar to those found across the Islamic world to obscene märchen.   During the performance, the narrators repeatedly parsed notions of identity, ethnic, linguistic, and otherwise, within in a joke cycle.  This paper illustrates how their ambiguous handling of issues of identity in the performance is reflective of the boys’ ambiguous relationship to the categories named in real life. (more…)

 

March 29, 2010

Lovesick Blues: Music and Nostalgia on Lower Broadway, Nashville, Tennessee

Posted by folkpub under Music, North America
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Lovesick Blues: Music and Nostalgia on Lower Broadway, Nashville, Tennessee

Timon Kaple
Indiana University

Abstract:

There are a handful of city blocks in Nashville, Tennessee, that constitute the area known as “Lower Broadway” on Broadway Avenue. Known as the city’s premier hotspot for live music, this area attracts a wide variety of patrons: regulars, locals, and tourists.  What brings them together is a mental concept of “Old Nashville,” rooted in feelings of nostalgia and romanticization for the city’s golden era, which I broadly define as the mid-1920s through mid-1960s.

The most important reason why I chose Lower Broadway as a research area, and the one that is most relevant to this study, is that it is a crossroads for listeners’ musical and bodily interpretations of authenticity in country music.  In other words, Lower Broadway is site where it is important for performers to look and sound like the real thing.  What is the real thing, and how does one perform this ideal authenticity?  Additionally, who is in search of this Nashville authenticity? (more…)

 

March 29, 2010

From the Editor

Posted by folkpub under Editor Remarks
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Dear Reader,

Folklore Forum is pleased to present in this issue proceedings from the second annual collaborative conference between the Indiana University Folklore and Ethnomusicology Student Associations and The Ohio State University Folklore Student Association. The 2009 conference took place at Indiana University on March 27-28 and featured papers and posters centered on the theme of the negotiation of the public and the private.

In this second issue based upon the proceedings of the IU/OSU graduate student conference, Folklore Forum will bring its readers more of the exciting and innovative work of today’s graduate students in folklore and will continue to explore the possibilities provided by our online publishing model.

In addition to papers from this conference, this issue includes a poster with an extended contextualizing abstract, which we hope will provide the basis for involved discussion of the fieldwork being presented as a kind of continuation of the poster session in which it was presented.

We hope that papers will engender as much discussion on this forum as posters and offer a study of the negotiation of performance in terms of genre and ethnic and linguistic identity by two Afghan storytellers as a particularly stimulating basis for such discussion. A version of this study won the 2009 Dan Crowley Memorial Research Prize from the Storytelling Section of the American Folklore Society.

The theme of the public and the private is taken up most strongly in an ethnomusicological paper about dichotomies in mainline protestant worship music. This paper examines the public/private dichotomy alongside others such as traditional/contemporary, routinized/charismatic, and Appolonian/Dyonisian, which have been brought to bear on the study of religion through one church’s musical choices in its two weekly services.

New media publishing is brought to the fore in an article about fan response and specifically fan-produced videos that arose in response to 2008′s Internet-circulated Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Forum is pleased to provide its readership with not only descriptions of the videos at issue, but the videos themselves.

We here at Folklore Forum had hoped to bring to our readers an experience of the conference beyond the papers and posters prepared specifically for it. Unfortunately, our efforts to include the roundtable discussion with which the conference closed and the keynote address were plagued with technical difficulties and cannot be presented. We are already working to remedy these problems with regards to the issue that will be based on the third iteration of this conference that will take place at The Ohio State University on April 2 and 3, 2010.

Once again we invite our readers to make use of our forum to continue the dialogue that these articles initiate.

Monica Foote
Editor, Folklore Forum

 

September 28, 2009

Testimony and Truth after Auschwitz

Posted by folkpub under Europe, Narrative
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Testimony and Truth After Auschwitz

Sarah Gordon
Indiana University

Abstract:

Survivor testimony of the Holocaust often deviates from historical fact.  Postmodern theory allows for the near nihilation of that testimony by arguing that history is nothing but a version of events.  This paper seeks to authenticate survivor testimony in a postmodern context through the exploration of an ethics of testimony, concluding that factual truth and testimonial truth are members of fundamentally different categories, the latter dependent not on accuracy but on the social, ethical mandate to respect the memory of people who suffer and die so that others may live to tell the story. (more…)

 

May 1, 2009

“Ten Little Niggers”: The Making of a Black Man’s Consciousness

Posted by folkpub under African American, Children's Folklore, North America, Race
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“Ten Little Niggers”: The Making of a Black Man’s Consciousness

Tiffany M.B. Anderson
The Ohio State University

Abstract:

During Reconstruction in the 1860s, the proud Confederate states found themselves in a place of subordination.  Forced to concede their free slave labor, the former citizens of the Confederacy refused to fold their ideology of the inferiority of the freed slaves.  A “comic” song titled “Ten Little Niggers” circulated through the United States in Minstrel shows and children’s nursery rhyme books in keeping with this ideology.

This paper explores how the ballad shapes social and cultural race consciousness. While the purpose of its widespread popularity was to refute the competency and human qualities of the black freedmen to white audiences, the ultimate legacy that the rhyme leaves behind is the mental conditioning of following generations of black males. The white population who circulated the song intended to define the black freedmen as barbaric and ignorant, yet the song also connected the white-constructed definition of ‘nigger’ to the black man’s consciousness. (more…)

 

May 1, 2009

Edward M. Bruner. Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Tourism
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Edward M. Bruner. Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. University of Chicago Press, 2004. 312 pages, 48 halftones. $62.50 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Tracy Musacchio
Knox College

Tourism has a profound effect not only on tourists but also on the cultures visited, as heritage is adapted to the demands of tourism and the historical narrative begins, even, to be reshaped. In this volume Edward M. Bruner, a noted field anthropologist, studies the phenomenon of cultural tourism. He focuses on touristic narratives and, in his words, “the difference between a touristic and an ethnographic sensibility” (1). Bruner’s interest in cultural tourism first developed when he served as a tour guide on a trip to Indonesia. His attempts to educate the group of travelers about the phenomenon of tourism and its interactions with local cultures (for example, that the “native” dance shows they were witnessing were actually modern performances created for the tourist industry) were thwarted by the trip’s coordinator, and he was effectively fired. (more…)

 

April 24, 2009

Within Their Own Seams: 19th Century Fashion and the Management of the Body in Women’s Literature and Letters

Posted by folkpub under Dress, Europe, Identity, India, Modernity
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Within Their Own Seams: 19th Century Fashion and the Management of the Body in Women’s Literature and Letters

Kristiana Willsey
Indiana University

Abstract:

Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1855 novel, North and South, demonstrates the significant position women’s fashion played in the construction and maintenance of identity and self-expression.  Drawing on Gaskell’s novel as well as excerpts from other 19th century women’s letters, travelogues, and memoirs, we see how through imported fashions, English women participated in Empire making and confronted the problems of establishing English identity abroad. Women simultaneously occupied particular local identities and transcended them, articulating the tensions of maintaining both national and international identities through the feminine medium of fashion. At the same time, the tightly managed, corseted body represented a complex response to the advent of modernism. (more…)

 

April 24, 2009

Ulrich Marzolph, ed. The Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Folktales
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Ulrich Marzolph, ed. The Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective. Wayne State University Press, 2007. 348 pages, $31.95 paper.

Fredericka Schmadel
Indiana University

Ulrich Marzolph, editor of Wayne State University Press’s 2007 book, The Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective, called the Nights a “shape shifter (ix)” and as such, slippery and elusive, especially in view of the torrent of translations, imitations, inclusions, and scholarly and – in the Middle East, ethicist – commentary or even condemnation over the centuries. A transnational perspective is an absolute necessity when one considers that the work in question predates the advent of the modern nation-state. Like the pyramids of Egypt, this collection has lasted untold centuries, but unlike the pyramids, it has moved from its original location to settle into many cultures, many traditions. In this book we glimpse the Nights in a Hawaiian translation, see its reflection in France – the France of long ago and of not so long ago – as well as Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Greece, Baluchistan, India, Japan, Turkey, Persian-influenced countries, Afghanistan, and the international realms of feminist theory, oral performance, psychology, and, of course, politics. We see, in Aboubakr Chraibi’s words, the homage reality pays to this fictional universe, this compilation that has grown and changed over many centuries. It’s clear from the scope and the variety of the contributions that this collection will inspire further research. (more…)

 

April 8, 2009

Harold Hinds, et al. Popular Culture Theory and Methodology: A Basic Introduction

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Popular Culture, Theory
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Harold E. Hinds, Jr., Marilyn F. Motz, and Angela M. S. Nelson, eds. Popular Culture Theory and Methodology: A Basic Introduction. Madison: Popular Press/ University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Pp. vii + 406, introduction, bibliography. $65.00 hardcover, $21.95 paperback.

Trevor J. Blank
Indiana University

The relationship between folklore and popular culture has been the subject of scrutiny amongst folklorists, and the study of the connections between these fields is problematic for scholars entangled in debates over the scope and legitimacy of their disciplines. The comparative analysis of popular culture by folklorists has been peripheral, not rigorous. However, it is important to note the influential role of popular culture on folklore, and this field certainly merits the attention of folklorists and cultural historians. Popular Culture Theory and Methodology provides a wonderful introduction for folklorists and interested scholars seeking to enhance their knowledge of the core fundamental theories, methods, and debates that have shaped the popular culture discipline since its acceptance as a serious academic field in the 1960s. (more…)

 

March 24, 2009

Gerbilling Reconsidered: Comparing Talk of Foodways and Sexways

Posted by folkpub under Legends, Sexways
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Gerbilling Reconsidered: Comparing Talk of Foodways and Sexways

Christopher Lewis
The Ohio State University

Abstract
This paper considers the gerbilling legend of the early 1990s. The author contends that, by re-envisioning gay sex as gerbilling specifically rather than anal sex generally, heterosexual tellers of the legend grant themselves permission to participate in anal sex without participating in gay sex—a necessary function at the beginning of the AIDS pandemic. He also contends that reading it against rumors and legends of ethnic foodways more conclusively reveals that the gerbilling legend primarily stigmatizes the gerbil as a sex partner, not the act of rectal insertion, and that therefore the legend is not necessarily anti-anal sex. Meanwhile, it appears to remain anti-homosexual because of how tellers separate themselves from same-sex desire even while embracing traditional homosexual sexways. The paper concludes with a queer approach to the story that reconsiders gerbilling as an acceptable sexual act.
(more…)

 

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