Uncle Remus and the Politics of Authenticity

Recently I have been thinking about the politics of authenticity and the cultural, political, and racial complexity of the Antebellum and Civil War periods in the American South, namely through an examination of the production, performance, and dissemination of the infamous Uncle Remus tales originally published by a controversial White Southern folklorist named Joel Chandler Harris.  Harris had spent years working as an apprentice on a southern plantation in Georgia where he routinely experienced the performance of oral narratives by enslaved African-Americans.  Harris wanted to preserve the folklore of African-American slavery, including the everyday story-telling language and speech of African-Americans living in bondage, as he experienced it firsthand, in all of its intricately complex perfomative detail.  He was said to have had an impeccable ear for listening.  Accordingly, he mobilized his talent for listening in his commitment to preserving the original voices of African-American slave narratives, in their raw, authentic form as he experienced them while working on the plantation. Harris was very much a product of his times.  Indeed, he has been rightly criticized for harboring many of the overtly racist and even pro-slavery views that were common in the Southern U.S. at the time.  Harris was neither an abolitionist nor a critical historian, nor did he claim to be.  His literary passion was for the cultural preservation of the folklore of enslaved African-Americans as he directly experienced it, especially animal trickster tales.

In the video below Youtube singer and performer Todd Carpenter reads Uncle Remus's original "Wonderful Tar Baby Story" by Joel Chandler Harris.  I find Carpenter's historical contextualizing of Uncle Remus in the video below quite inadequate.  I also don't think I completely agree with his choice of language concerning so-called 'political correctness'.   Finally, I think Carpenter should be a bit more explicit about the politics of performing a specific kind of African-American Southern dialect ('Southern' alone is an inadequate description of the dialect he appropriates), including the fact that this particular dialect is based on the voices of African-American slaves as experienced and documented by Joel Chandler Harris.  Nonetheless, I think Carpenter does a wonderful job performing the story, and in so doing sheds important light on the politics of authenticity in the history of the American South.  I believe performances such as the one featured in this video are 'good to think with' as Donna Haraway would say, so I am sharing it here.