New Books in Folklore

Folklorist Robert L. Stone presents a rare collection of high-quality documentary photos of the sacred steel guitar musical tradition and the community that supports it. The introductory text and extended photo captions in Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus! Photographs from the Sacred Steel Community (University of Mississippi Press, 2020) offer the reader an intimate view of this unique tradition of passionately played music that is beloved among fans of American roots music and admired by folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and other scholars.In 1992, a friend in Hollywood, Florida, introduced Stone to African American musicians who played the electric steel guitar in the African American Holiness-Pentecostal churches House of God and Church of the Living God. With the passion, skill, and unique voice they brought to the instruments, these musicians profoundly impressed Stone. He produced an album for the Florida Folklife Program, which Arhoolie Records licensed and released worldwide. It created a roots music sensation.In 1996, Stone began to document the tradition beyond Florida. He took the photos in this book from 1992 to 2008 in Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida, and at concerts in Italy. The images capture musicians as they play for worship services before spirit-filled believers singing, dancing, shouting, praying, and testifying. Stone gives the viewer much to witness, always presenting his passionate subjects with dignity. His sensitive portrayal of this community attests to the ongoing importance of musical traditions in African American life and worship.Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

On January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, hundreds of cities in the U.S. and across the globe organized Women’s Marches in response to Trump’s misogynistic comments and as a general rebuke of his election. In this collection edited by Dr. Rachelle (Riki) Saltzman, established and emerging scholars contribute essays that examine the folkloric aspects of the Women’s Marches. Hear our conversation as we discuss the symbolic elements of these protests.First, Dr. Saltzman tells me about her start in folklore with her fascinating adventures in documenting the oral histories of Chesapeake watermen on the Eastern Shore in Maryland as a college student and then later curating thousands of World War II letters written by American soldiers who corresponded with a secretary at a Jewish YMCA.We begin our discussion of Pussyhats, Politics, and Public Protest (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) by talking about the deliberate timing of its release. While the publication focuses on the Women’s Marches that took place at the beginning of Trump’s presidency, the release of the book takes place as his administration wraps up and a new one begins. Dr. Saltzman characterizes the 2017 Women’s Marches as “carnivalesque” where public events have a number of features of the carnival – the turning of the world upside down, poking fun, and critiquing those in power under the license of festivity with the possibility of transformative change. The protests signs were also a significant part of the marches, engaging in humor and puns to critique the status quo but also as a means to understand the community. Similarly, the pussy hats also carry symbolic meaning of community making and we share our stories of receiving our own pussy hats from friends. From there we discuss a queer art studio that created conversation about the protests through its jewelry and the multiple generations that attended the protests.Dr. Saltzman is a folklorist at the High Desert Museum and the Oregon Folklife Network where she was also the former Executive Director. She also teaches at the University of Oregon as a lecturer in the Folklore and Public Culture program.Nancy Yan received her PhD in folklore from The Ohio State University and taught First Year Writing, Comparative Studies, and Asian American studies for several years before returning to organizing work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

The town of Pinhook in Missouri was founded in the 1940s by southern Black farmers who were looking for land that they could purchase and own in the face of limited options. It was low land that was often flooded, but the farmers were able to clear it and successfully farm it for decades to come while building up a small town. However, in 2011, after heavy rains and historic flooding, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to breach the Birds Point levee. Pinhook, directly in the flood zone, was completely destroyed.David Todd Lawrence and Elaine Lawless, in their book When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri (University Press of Mississippi, 2018), document the narratives of the town’s former residents which counter the official story from the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers - that the levee breach was a success story of saved lives and property. Winner of the 2019 Chicago Folklore Prize, the book offers a vivid portrait of the town’s efforts to rebuild and maintain their community ties, and theorizes the destruction and government neglect of this town.In our conversation, Dr. Lawrence and Dr. Lawless discuss the events that led to the flooding of Pinhook and the question of historical racism in overlooking the town when the decision was made to breach the levee. The authors describe life and community in the town of Pinhook and what happened after the flood. We also talk about the role and responsibilities of the researcher when collaborating with communities. Lastly, we hear about Debra Robinson-Tarver who organized the evacuation of the residents and continued to keep the Pinhook community together as they pursued recompense.You can learn more about the efforts to rebuild Pinhook here and the documentary film Taking Pinhook can be viewed here.Dr. David Todd Lawrence is an Associate Professor who teaches folklore and African American literature and culture at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is currently working with the Urban Art Mapping Project on street art in the Twin Cities. Since the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, they have been collecting images of street art related to the movement for the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art database. If you would like to contribute images, please submit them here or email Dr. Lawrence directly at DTLAWRENCE@stthomas.edu.Dr. Elaine Lawless is Professor Emerita at the University of Missouri where she taught folklore and Women’s and Gender Studies. She is the author of six books, including Troubling Violence: A Performance Project (University Press of Mississippi, 2010). Dr. Lawless is currently based in North Carolina.Nancy Yan received her PhD in folklore from The Ohio State University and taught First Year Writing, Comparative Studies, and Asian American studies for several years before returning to organizing work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Michael Slouber's new book A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses: Tales of the Feminine Divine from India and Beyond (University of California Press, 2020) surveys the diversity of India's feminine divine tradition by bringing together a fresh array of captivating and largely overlooked Hindu goddess narratives from different regions. As the first such anthology of goddess narratives in translation, it highlights a range of sources from ancient myths to modern lore. The goddesses in this book battle demons, perform miracles, and grant rare Tantric visions to their devotees. Each translation is paired with a short essay that explains the goddesses­­s historical and social context, demonstrating the ways religion changes ov­­er time.Christopher Austen is Associate Professor, Religious Studies at Dalhousie University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

A quinceañera is a traditional fifteenth birthday celebration for young women (though in contemporary times, it can also be for young men) in many Latinx communities. While the celebration has roots in religiosity, it has also become a space for imagining and performing class, identity, and Americanity. With fieldwork conducted in California, Texas, Indiana, and Mexico City, Dr. Rachel Gonzàlez provides a richly nuanced study in her recent book Quinceañera Style: Social Belonging and Latinx Consumer Identities (University of Texas Press, 2019) that examines the quinceañera as a site of possibility where young woman and their families can take ownership of their identity through consumerist actions and challenge narratives of Latinx class status that emphasize poverty and unstable migratory status by presenting an image of middle-class Latinx familiesIn this podcast, we talk about how Dr. Gonzàlez’s move from studying neurology to studying folklore and why it was so important to study quinceañera with the lens of representation rather than ritual. We also discuss the ways in which aspirations of class mobility and Americanity are articulated through style and consumerist choices. The digital sphere also serves as an important creative space where information about quinceaneras – from clothing, advice, themes, and videos – are shared and allow young women and/or her family to imagine the possibilities for constructing a celebration that reflect their own ideals. Lastly, we discuss the ways in which Lia Garcia, a trans activist based in Mexico, uses the quinceañera in performance art to challenge perceptions of the body.Dr. Rachel Gonzàlez is an Associate Professor of Mexican American and Latino/a Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.Nancy Yan received her PhD in folklore from The Ohio State University and taught First Year Writing, Comparative Studies, and Asian American studies for several years before returning to organizing work.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Public Performances: Studies in the Carnivalesque and Ritualesque (University Press of Colorado) offers a deep and wide-ranging exploration of relationships among genres of public performance and of the underlying political motivations they share. Illustrating the connections among three themes—the political, the carnivalesque, and the ritualesque—the volume provides rich and comprehensive insight into public performance as an assertion of political power.Dr. Jack Santino is professor of folklore and popular culture and has served as director of the Bowling Green Center for Popular Culture Studies. He was the Alexis de Tocqueville Distinguished Professor at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, 2010–2011. He was a Fulbright Scholar to Northern Ireland and has conducted research in Spain and France. His documentary film on Pullman Porters, Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle, received four Emmy awards. His research centers on rituals and celebrations, with a particular focus on carnival and political and public ritual as reflective of political, social, and cultural identity. He is the author of numerous books and articles.Dr. Isabel Machado is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Department of History of the University of Memphis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

What does it mean to be a Brahmin, and what could it mean to become one?The ancient Indian mythological figure Viśvāmitra accomplishes just this, transforming himself from a king into a Brahmin by cultivation of ascetic power.The book, Crossing the Lines of Caste, examines legends of the irascible Viśvāmitra as occurring in Sanskrit and vernacular texts, oral performances, and visual media to show how the "storyworlds" created by these various retellings have adapted and reinforced Brahmin social identity over the millennia.Adheesh Sathaye is Associate Professor, Sanskrit Literature And Folklore, University of British Columbia. You can check out his online class "Narrative Literature in Premodern India" here.For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Why do contemporary writers use myths from ancient Greece and Rome, Pharaonic Egypt, the Viking north, Africa's west coast, and Hebrew and Christian traditions? What do these stories from premodern cultures have to offer us? In her new book, The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960, Professor Kathryn Hume examines how myth has shaped writings by Kathy Acker, Margaret Atwood, William S. Burroughs, A. S. Byatt, Neil Gaiman, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jeanette Winterson, and others, and contrasts such canonical texts with fantasy, speculative fiction, post-singularity fiction, pornography, horror, and graphic narratives. She argues that these artistic practices produce a feeling of meaning that doesn't need to be defined in scientific or materialist terms. Myth provides a sense of rightness, a recognition of matching a pattern, a feeling of something missing, a feeling of connection. It not only allows poetic density but also manipulates our moral judgments, or at least stimulates us to exercise them. Working across genres, populations, and critical perspectives, Hume elicits an understanding of the current uses of mythology in fiction.Kathryn (Kit) Hume started as a medievalist in Old English, Middle English, and Old Norse, but has become a specialist in contemporary fiction. Her books have investigated fantasy, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Italo Calvino’s novels, and a great many contemporary Anglophone writers. She also drew on her experience as a job placement officer to write Surviving your Academic Job Hunt: Advice for Humanities PhDs.Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

The culture of insurgents in early modern Europe was primarily an oral one; memories of social conflicts in the communities affected were passed on through oral forms such as songs and legends. This popular history continued to influence political choices and actions through and after the early modern period. The chapters in Rhythms of Revolt: European Traditions and Memories of Social Conflict in Oral Culture (Routledge, 2018), edited by Éva Guillorel, David Hopkin, and William G. Pooley, examine numerous examples from across Europe of how memories of revolt were perpetuated in oral cultures, and they analyse how traditions were used. From the German Peasants’ War of 1525 to the counter-revolutionary guerrillas of the 1790s, oral traditions can offer radically different interpretations of familiar events. This is a ‘history from below’, and a history from song, which challenges existing historiographies of early modern revolts.Rachel Hopkin PhD is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore