SOURCE: "Folktales in the Harlem Renaissance," in American Literature, Vol. 58, No. 1, March, 1986, pp. 64-81.

In the following essay, Diepeveen examines the often ambivalent attitudes of Harlem Renaissance writers and thinkers toward the folklore of Africa and, more specifically, of African America.

During the Harlem Renaissance, the "rediscovery" of Black culture seemed to promise a celebration of the folktales that Blacks had inherited from Reconstruction and slavery. The earlier rejuvenation of spirituals, the other great component of the Black folk tradition, offered an apparent analogy. Folktales and spirituals were the two most widely known Black folk expressions; both had explicit references to slave culture, and both (perhaps because of these references) initially found little acceptance by Black intellectuals or the Black middle class. But in the years after the successful Fisk Jubilee Singers tours of the northern states and Europe (1871-78), major writers, in their books and in The...