Between Preservation and Reform: Challenging U.S. Constructions of Race and Nation in the Work of the Hampton Folklore Society, 1893–1900

The years between 1888 and 1900 saw the formalization of folklore studies within the US take place alongside the institutionalization of Jim Crow segregation, marking this as an especially significant moment for our understanding of the interrelationships between the discourses of folklore, race and nation.  More specifically, these years were marked by the founding of both the all-white American Folklore Society (AFS) and the predominantly black Hampton Folklore Society (HFS).  Thus I begin my talk by examining AFS co-founder William Wells Newell’s statements on the emerging discipline of folklore studies, arguing that Newell sought to formalize a scientistic and objectivist-oriented approach to folklore studies and to promote folklore as a “historical” science dedicated to the collection and preservation of “survivals” from a group’s past.  Within this context, I consider how African American folklorists from the Hampton Folklore Society worked within, but also beyond the confines of both Newell’s objectivist-oriented, scientistic approach to folklore, while also challenging the reformist approach to folklore championed by the white founders and administrators of their own home institution (the Hampton Institute).  Locating folklore studies within the US, but also extending into the Pacific, I show how the twin projects of preservation and reform were part and parcel of the US nationalist agenda at home and empire building efforts in the Pacific.  The Hampton folklorists, however, in connection with the larger black intellectual community, created innovative strategies (mining the oppositional histories embodied in black folklore and critiquing the objectifying lens used to view them and their folklore, for instance) to resist having their work limited and defined by these nationalist agendas.