Results by title

Incorporates experimental archaeology to understand the food-caching strategies led by Indigenous women in Late Woodland Michigan.

This experimental archaeology book centers on the decision of Indigenous women in Michigan’s Late Woodland to store food in cache pits for later use, to ensure a stable food supply. These food storage techniques were efforts to increase communal chances of survival in direct responses to sociopolitical changes. Kathryn M. Frederick highlights the importance of food storage in these communities and the decision-making and behaviors behind it.

To discover why food storage became a popular practice at that period, Frederick considered the efficacy of subterranean food storage and constructed experiments to understand the timing and use of cache pits and to test their reliability and efficiency. She also compiled ethnographic data on location, environmental conditions, movement strategies, and types of foodstuffs stored for dozens of hunter-gatherer groups. Two distinct patterns of food storage emerged: “reliant” and “redundant.” Frederick argues that the Indigenous women utilized a system of reliant storage during times of abundance but could switch to a redundant system as the socioeconomic climate shifted. This book will interest a wide swath of archaeologists and others interested in Indigenous foodways and women’s key roles.

Winner, Wayland D. Hand Prize, American Folklore Society, 2018

Originating in a homicide in St. Louis in 1899, the ballad of “Frankie and Johnny” became one of America’s most familiar songs during the first half of the twentieth century. It crossed lines of race, class, and artistic genres, taking form in such varied expressions as a folk song performed by Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly); a ballet choreographed by Ruth Page and Bentley Stone under New Deal sponsorship; a mural in the Missouri State Capitol by Thomas Hart Benton; a play by John Huston; a motion picture, She Done Him Wrong, that made Mae West a national celebrity; and an anti-lynching poem by Sterling Brown.

In this innovative book, Stacy I. Morgan explores why African American folklore—and “Frankie and Johnny” in particular—became prized source material for artists of diverse political and aesthetic sensibilities. He looks at a confluence of factors, including the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and resurgent nationalism, that led those creators to engage with this ubiquitous song. Morgan’s research uncovers the wide range of work that artists called upon African American folklore to perform in the 1930s, as it alternately reinforced and challenged norms of race, gender, and appropriate subjects for artistic expression. He demonstrates that the folklorists and creative artists of that generation forged a new national culture in which African American folk songs featured centrally not only in folk and popular culture but in the fine arts as well.

Free Up Yuhself explores and theorizes what it means to embody and be empowered by the chaos of transgression, evaluating the implications for people who destabilize the Caribbean region’s dominant gender and sexuality politics within the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora. This book examines how people actively utilize the carnivalesque—spaces of festivity and places of excitement, the extraordinary, the ritualistic—to confront, negotiate, disrupt, and transgress normative trends, boundaries, and perspectives in the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora communities. This book is particularly concerned with the ways that Caribbean people contest sexual and gendered expectations through their bodily performances across regional and diasporic festival spaces. Through illustrative, analytical, evaluative, and reflective chapters, the collection contemplates the themes of freedom, belonging, acceptance, and recognition as these affect the experience of people’s sense of being. The authors reflect on “freeing up” as a contentious politics, understanding that people have the capacity to enact their freedom through transgressive movements and performances that persistently grapple with notions of respectability, agency, empowerment, disruption, and the meanings and consequences of their varied social and political locations.