African Diaspora at Internet Archive: Greenwood Library of American Folktales

To start this week, here's a wonderful anthology edited by Thomas Green: The Greenwood Library of American Folktales: The South and the Caribbean.

You'll find over 130 stories here, organized with the same structure for the stories from the southern United States and from the Caribbean. There is also a detailed introduction that traces the African and indigenous contributions to these storytelling traditions.

The South: Origin Stories (15); Heroes, Heroines, Tricksters, and Fools (53); Sacred Tales of the Powers that Be (24); Secular Tales of the Powers that Be (7)

The Caribbean: Origin Stories (8); Heroes, Heroines, Tricksters, and Fools (12); Sacred Tales of the Powers that Be (8); Secular Tales of the Powers that Be (5)

While Green has edited the stories to make them easier to read (eliminating eye-dialect, etc.), he also includes an appendix with 12 of the stories unaltered. There is also a detailed bibliography of sources and reference works in the back of the book.

Thomas Green is also the editor of the Greenwood Library of World Folktales, which includes a volume dedicated to Africa, the Middle East, Australia, and Oceania. You'll find 165 pages of African folktales here:

These two books edited by Thomas Green provides a kind of crash course in both African and African Diaspora folktales, and both books are just a click away at the Internet Archive.

The Greenwood Library of American Folktales:

The South and the Caribbean

by Thomas Green