Yesterday I wrote about a new addition (scanned on December 21) to the Internet Archive digital library: African Tales, by Gcina Mhlophe. Today I want to share another really exciting new addition (scanned on December 28): African Folktales in the New World by William Bascom.
This was the book that prompted me to immerse myself in African folktales; I can still remember picking up this book for the first time a few years ago and devouring it from cover to cover in complete and utter amazement. What Bascom has done here is to take 14 African folktale types and then document them in their American versions, including North, Central, and South America, along with the Caribbean. It is an awesome piece of work, which Bascom completed at the very end of his life, publishing each chapter as an article one by one between 1976 and 1982; he died in 1981 before the publication of the final article and before the publication of the collected articles in this book in 1992. His friend and colleague, Alan Dundes, completed the editing of the actual book and also wrote a detailed foreword in which explains the reasons why Bascom undertook this African/American comparative project as the final work of his long career, devoting his retirement to the study of these folktales.
And, of course, these are just a tiny, a very tiny, selection of the types of African folktales. Some of my favorite stories are here, but many of my favorite stories are not. I will never be able to amass the kind of learning and insight that Bascom could bring to bear, and I am not able to read German with enough confidence to use the German sources (I can muddle my way through the French)... but in my own limited way, I hope to make a contribution to this comparative project. That's why I am inventorying and studying the African folktales that I have access to in written form, focusing on resources that are available to others online. Then, based on what I find and learn, I want to create some guides to folktale types, just as Bascom has done, showing the amazing variety of African folktale traditions to begin with, along with the profound emergence of those stories in the Americas. Something like the 1619 Project, but for folktales.
Anyway, I gave out an actual SHRIEK OF DELIGHT when I saw that this book had been added to the Books-to-Borrow at Internet Archive. Now that it is here, I recommend it to everyone. Even if you just pick one chapter to read, you will get to see what folklorists do and appreciate the depth and power of the African storytellers in the Diaspora. Now, thanks to the Internet Archive, we have access this book AND to Bascom's African Dilemma Tales book, which I wrote about in an earlier post... both of them brilliant and abounding in stories.
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