When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: AFRICAN-NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

by Jonathan Brennan

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. 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. The diverse essays cover a range of literatures from African-Native American mythology among the Seminoles and mixed folktales among the Cherokee to autobiography, fiction, poetry, and captivity narratives. Contributors discuss, among other topics, the Brer Rabbit tales, shifting identities in African-Native American communities, the creolization of African American and Native American mythologies and religions, and Mardi Gras Indian performance. Also considered are Alice Walker's development of an African-Native American identity in her fiction and essays and African-Native American subjectivity in the works of Toni Morrison and Sherman Alexie.

307 pages, Hardcover

First published May 14, 2003

Reviews

[Doria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Burdened by an overly long and turgidly-didactic introduction (it reads like a doctoral thesis), the actual essays in this collection are quite interesting and informative. Most of these essays assume familiarity on the part of the reader with many of the texts being analyzed, for instance, the novels of great authors such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and other brilliant lights in the African-Native American firmament. For readers who haven’t read those novels, spoilers abound; however, so does enlightenment.

My principal disappointment - as a folklorist - lies in the near total absence of primary sources (I.e. stories!) included in the essays concerning folktales that show evidence of both African and Native American influences and origins. There is a lot of useful and intelligent theorizing and analysis about the stories, but the essays would have benefited greatly from the inclusion of printed retellings/versions of the stories themselves. This would have allowed the reader to consider the theories and analysis for themselves more readily. I’d recommend reading those essays alongside the relevant stories, many of which can be found online or in book collections found in libraries.