Thoth distribution@thoth.pub Google 20260407T234319

urn:uuid:a94e57a8-fe20-4100-9796-0b8954a57cc8 03 15 9781805110071 00 EB E101 10 10 02 2054362X 01 02 World Oral Literature Series 01 01 Folktales of Mayotte, an African Island 1 A01 Lee Haring Lee Haring is Professor Emeritus of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He has taught in graduate folklore programs at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Connecticut. He has conducted folklore fieldwork in Kenya, Madagascar (as Fulbright Senior Lecturer), and Mauritius (as Fulbright researcher). His book Stars and Keys: Folktales and Creolization in the Indian Ocean translates and comments on a hundred stories from Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, the Comoros, and Seychelles. He has also published Malagasy Tale Index, a comprehensive analysis of folktales; the English translation of Ibonia, Epic of Madagascar, available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0034; Verbal Arts in Madagascar, a study of four genres of oral literature; the bilingual field manual Collecting Folklore in Mauritius, in English and Kreol, two tale collections; and numerous journal articles. In 2013 he was given a Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award by the American Folklore Society. 2 A23 Mark Turin 01 eng 00 198 03 23 Folklore and Ethnology 04 GR360.M348 12 JFHF 23 oral narrators 10 SOC002010 12 JHMC 23 literary skills 23 Literature 10 SOC011000 12 HBTD 23 Other languages 23 versatility 23 African Studies 23 small African island 23 Anthropology 23 French ethnographer 23 interview 23 1970s-80s 23 ancient values 23 preservation 23 postcolonial world 23 island of Mayotte 01 06 03 00 The book uncovers the versatility and literary skills of oral narrators in a small African island. Relying on the researches of three French ethnographers who interviewed storytellers in the 1970s-80s, Lee Haring shows a once-colonised people using verbal art to preserve ancient values in the postcolonial world, when the island of Mayotte was transforming itself from a neglected colony to an overseas department of France. The author’s innovation is to read ethnographic researches as play scripts—to see printed folktales as accounts of live performances. One storyteller after another comments symbolically on what it is like to be a formerly colonised population. Storytelling women, in particular, combine diverse plots and characters to create traditional-sounding stories, which could not have been predicted from the African, Malagasy, Indian, and European traditions coexisting in Mayotte. Haring’s account shows them to be particularly skilled at irony and ambiguity, conveying both submissive and rebellious attitudes in their tales. He makes Mayotte storytelling accessible to a new, English-speaking audience and demonstrates that traditional storytellers in those years were preserving, but also critiquing, their inherited social order in a changing world. Their creative intentions, cultural influences and widely different narrative styles constitute Mayotte’s system of the arts of the word.Literary specialists, folklore enthusiasts, and people who like reading stories will find much to appreciate in this engaging and sophisticated book. 04 00 Foreword 1 Mark Turin Preface 3 A Note on the Text 9 1. Mayotte Is Ours 11 2. Varieties of Performing 49 3. Giving an Account of Herself 121 Works Cited 175 List of Illustrations 183 Index 185 Open Book Publishers 01 Open Book Publishers 04 01 20230713 02 WORLD 06 15 9781805110040 06 15 9781805110057 06 15 9781805110064 06 15 9781805110101 06 15 9781805110095 06 15 9781805110071 WORLD 09 Open Book Publishers 20 02 5.99 GBP WORLD