Rethinking Gullah-Geechee Religious Cultures

The history of “the Gullah” in published works tells an interesting story about race, identity and the construction of knowledge. However, little attention has been paid to the intellectual and cultural motives of the researchers and writers who took up the task of documenting, collecting, capturing, and imagining the culture and folk traditions of the blacks who live on Georgia’s and South Carolina’s coast. When the lens is turned from “Gullah folk,” and is instead fixed on the researchers and writers who “made” them in their published works, one finds an interesting cast of characters—the majority of whom were women—using the Gullah to work through complicated ideas about race and identity. Elsie Clews Parsons, Julia Peterkin, Lydia Parrish, Mary Granger, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, and Julie Dash are the women whose folklore studies and fictional works firmly planted the Gullah in the national imagination. This paper genders Gullah researchers and writers, and reads their contributions within the time periods that they were produced.