Winner of the 2018 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction
These nearly 150 African American folktales animate our past and reclaim a lost cultural legacy to redefine American literature.Drawing from the great folklorists of the past while expanding African American lore with dozens of tales rarely seen before, The Annotated African American Folktales revolutionizes the canon like no other volume. Following in the tradition of such classics as Arthur Huff Fausetâs âNegro Folk Tales from the Southâ (1927), Zora Neale Hurstonâs Mules and Men (1935), and Virginia Hamiltonâs The People Could Fly (1985), acclaimed scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar assemble a groundbreaking collection of folktales, myths, and legends that revitalizes a vibrant African American past to produce the most comprehensive and ambitious collection of African American folktales ever published in American literary history. Arguing for the value of these deceptively simple stories as part of a sophisticated, complex, and heterogeneous cultural heritage, Gates and Tatar show how these remarkable stories deserve a place alongside the classic works of African American literature, and American literature more broadly.
Opening with two introductory essays and twenty seminal African tales as historical background, Gates and Tatar present nearly 150 African American stories, among them familiar Brer Rabbit classics, but also stories like âThe Talking Skullâ and âWitches Who Ride,â as well as out-of-print tales from the 1890sâ Southern Workman. Beginning with the figure of Anansi, the African trickster, master of improvisationâa spider who plots and weaves in scandalous waysâThe Annotated African American Folktales then goes on to draw Caribbean and Creole tales into the orbit of the folkloric canon. It retrieves stories not seen since the Harlem Renaissance and brings back archival tales of âNegro folkloreâ that Booker T. Washington proclaimed had emanated from a âgrapevineâ that existed even before the American Revolution, stories brought over by slaves who had survived the Middle Passage. Furthermore, Gates and Tatarâs volume not only defines a new canon but reveals how these folktales were hijacked and misappropriated in previous incarnations, egregiously by Joel Chandler Harris, a Southern newspaperman, as well as by Walt Disney, who cannibalized and capitalized on Harrisâs volumes by creating cartoon characters drawn from this African American lore.
Presenting these tales with illuminating annotations and hundreds of revelatory illustrations, The Annotated African American Folktales reminds us that stories not only move, entertain, and instruct but, more fundamentally, inspire and keep hope alive.
The Annotated African American Folktales includes:
Introductory essays, nearly 150 African American stories, and 20 seminal African tales as historical backgroundThe familiar Brer Rabbit classics, as well as news-making vernacular tales from the 1890sâ Southern WorkmanAn entire section of  Caribbean and Latin American folktales that finally become incorporated into the canonApproximately 200 full-color, museum-quality images color throughout; 160 illustrations