Department of English Symposium-Wednesday, March 14 at 7PM in HGL 315

Jennifer C. Vaught
“Twelfth Night and Mardi Gras Krewes in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans and their Appropriations of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton”

Twelfth Night and Mardi Gras krewes in nineteenth-century New Orleans focused a number of their parades on canonical works by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton in order to promote their elite status through street theater. Then and now, the Crescent City contains numerous immigrants not only from France, Spain, Ireland, Catholic Germany, and Italy but also from the Middle Atlantic States. These Anglo-American immigrants, who brought with them a distinctly English heritage, perpetuated traditional festivities that had been celebrated for centuries in medieval and Renaissance England and Europe. The Mistick Krewe of Comus (1857) and the Twelfth Night Revelers (1870) appropriated Renaissance texts as a means for reinforcing the existing status quo favoring the wealthy, Anglo-American establishment in New Orleans. Their white supremacist and socially exclusionary aims threatened to erase the popular, communal, and egalitarian dimensions of Shakespeare’s, Spenser’s, and Milton’s works, many of which are rooted in English or Irish folklore.


Jo Davis-McElligatt

“Black and Immigrant: The Politics of Reconfiguring the ‘African’ in African American in the Age of Obama”

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, not only have more Africans arrived on American shores than were forced to migrate during the transatlantic slave trade, but our first president of African descent, Barack Hussein Obama, has ancestral roots not in the American South, but in the nation of Kenya. In this talk I make the case that we must expand the traditional African American canon in order to take seriously the presence and history of immigrants of African descent to the United States—immigrants who came and continue to come of their own volition from locations in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. As such, I contend that a radical reconfiguration of the field—in both canonical and theoretical scope—is necessary if we wish to remain in step with the world around us.

Brandon Barker and Clai Rice
“Folk Illusions (A Newly Recognized Genre of Folklore): Crossing the Hands, Floating the Arms, and Levitating the Body”

This presentation will introduce the category of "folk illusions," our name for the genre of childhood and adolescent folklore in which performances of traditionalized verbal and kinesthetic actions consistently effect an intended embodied illusion for one or more participants. We will briefly present four types of folk illusions, chosen to illustrate the relative morphological complexity of the genre. Then, we will elaborate on and compare two variants of levitation play—“Light as a Feather” and “Lift from a Chair”—commonly performed by local adolescents. Our presentation will demonstrate that folk illusions provide an excellent workshop for assisting scholars of different disciplines, including folkloristics, cognitive science, and semiotics, to identify specific ways that cultural processes help constitute embodied experience. The introductory part of the presentation will consist of material contained in our article to appear soon in the Journal of American Folklore, while the latter part will present new fieldwork and analysis.