Folktales of Mayotte, an African Island - cover image

Copyright

Lee Haring

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80511-004-0
Hardback978-1-80511-005-7
PDF978-1-80511-006-4
HTML978-1-80511-010-1
XML978-1-80511-009-5
EPUB978-1-80511-007-1
AZW3978-1-80511-008-8

Language

  • English

Dimensions

Paperback156 x 234 mm (6.14" x 9.21")
Hardback156 x 234 mm (6.14" x 9.21")

BIC

  • JFHF
  • JHMC
  • HBTD

BISAC

  • SOC002010
  • SOC011000

    Folktales of Mayotte, an African Island

    • Lee Haring (author)
    FORTHCOMING
    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.

    Endorsements

    Lee Haring’s study of the oral tales of the Mayotte through the lenses of literary theory successfully opens new avenues in folklore scholarship.

    Prof Dan Ben-Amos

    University of Pennsylvania

    Contributors

    Lee Haring

    (author)
    Professor Emeritus of English at City University of New York