User:Neckritz98/sandbox

Folklore

Arthur Huff Fauset was very interested in folklore and conducted fieldwork in the South, the Caribbean, and Nova Scotia to learn these tales. During the time of the Harlem Renaissance, he also made large contributions in bringing awareness to African American folklore that seemed to have been undermined and forgotten. While he did not make many contributions to folklore in theater, he did spread light on them through tales, songs, conundrums, and jokes. However, he was known for letting African American voices speak for themselves and tell their own stories. He did not alter or try to input his own theories in them, but rather just told them the way that they were told to him. This approach caused many people to read and appreciate his writing and he first piece appeared in The Crisis while he was a college student at the University of Pennsylvania with his short story "The Tale Of The North Carolina Woods" in January of 1922. He aimed to cultivate and revive African American culture through these tales and reestablish a sense of pride that had long been abandoned.

The only time when Fauset did input his own theories and ideas in these stories was in his fist book Folklore from Nova Scotia which he published in 1931. Through this book, he portrayed how his understanding of folklore revolved around the diffusion model which looks at how information spreads throughout a population. He spoke about how African American folklore had changed overtime in that it now integrated in it folklore from other cultures such as Irish or French. Fauset believed that this was not because Negroes had assimilated to the dominant culture of their province but because they had been contributing part of their culture to the dominant culture and through that process also integrated aspects of the dominant culture into their own. During his time in Nova Scotia in the summer of 1923, Fauset found that hardly any of the traditional stories told by Negroes in the United States were told in Nova Scotia and the ones told there were unheard of to those in the United States. It was as though each group only had small pieces of a larger puzzle and needed help in organizing and bringing all of their stories together to get a better sense of their whole culture. This is where Fauset helped in tying together and spreading these stories to better educate all Negroes of their heritage. However, this was not the only role he played but also used these stories to debunk stereotypes of African Americans which had been assigned as truths. For example, he pointed out that while talking to Negroes in Nova Scotia, many of them said that they would go down to visit the states if the weather there wasn't as hot there. This debunked the stereotype that all Negroes enjoyed and were drawn to warmer climates and gave them a more authentic identity at a time when they were being portrayed as minstrels in the United States.

[[Photo of Arthur Huff Fauset.jpg]]