When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: AFRICAN-NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

by Jonathan Brennan

Overview

An exploration of the literature, history, and culture of people of mixed African American and Native American descent, When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote is the first book to theorize an African-Native American literary tradition. In examining this overlooked tradition, the book prompts a reconsideration of interracial relations in American history and literature.
 
Jonathan Brennan, in a sweeping historical and analytical introduction to this collection of essays, surveys several centuries of literature in the context of the historical and cultural exchange and development of distinct African-Native American traditions. Positing a new African-Native American literary theory, he illuminates the roles subjectivity, situational identities, and strategic discourse play in defining African-Native American literatures.
 
Brennan provides a thorough background to the literary tradition and a valuable overview to topics discussed in the essays. He examines African-Native American political and historical texts, travel narratives, and the Mardi Gras Indian tradition, suggesting that this evolving oral tradition parallels the development of numerous Black Indian literary traditions in the United States and Latin America.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252028199
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	05/14/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Brennan, an English instructor at Mission College, is the editor of Mixed Race Literature. He has also been an assistant editor at the San Francisco Review of Books and editor of The Berkeley Poetry Review.
 

Table of Contents

	Preface	xi
	Acknowledgments	xv
	Introduction: Recognition of the African-Native American Literary Tradition	1
Part 1	African-Native American Folklore
1.	On the Interaction of Traditions: Southeastern Rabbit Tales as African-Native American Folklore	101
2.	Brer Rabbit and His Cherokee Cousin: Moving Beyond the Appropriation Paradigm	114
Part 2	African-Native American Captivity and Slave Narratives
3.	Briton Hammon, the Indian Captivity Narrative, and the African American Slave Narrative	141
4.	Recapturing John Marrant	158
5.	Speaking Cross Boundaries: A Nineteenth-Century African-Native American Autobiography	168
Part 3	Mardi Gras Indian Performance
6.	In Search of the Mardi Gras Indians	197
7.	Mardi Gras Indians: Carnival and Counternarrative in Black New Orleans	218
Part 4	Contemporary African-Native American Subjectivity
8.	Wrapped in the Serpent's Tail: Alice Walker's African-Native American Subjectivity	241
9.	"If You Know I Have a History, You Will Respect Me": A Perspective on African-Native American Literature	257
10.	African-Native American Subjectivity and the Blues Voice in the Writings of Toni Morrison and Sherman Alexie	278
	Contributors	293
	Index	297