Beyond frontiers: a review of analytical paradigms in folklore studies

Abstract

The following is a broad interdisciplinary discussion of some of the most important issues involved in the representation and interpretation of African verbal art by Africanists and some African scholars. I will contest the painfully familiar pattern of perceiving and evaluating African verbal art — an introduction of generalizations about how exotic African cultures can be, which is followed by any number of disembodied ‘texts’ and interpretations generated by analytical parameters that remain fuzzy. The politics of this kind of research have long been dictated by the academic assumptions of those Africanists and some African scholars whose instruments for analyses have been restricted to only certain facets of the real nature of verbal art. I will attempt to clarify the main analytical paradigms of text, context, tradition, genre, and the scholarly practices by discussing them as theoretical constructs. I also argue that verbal art evokes, in totality, ‘situatedness’: specificity of social, cultural and historical reality. I suggest that verbal art is constituted by poetic configurations, institutional modes for the production and reception of discourse (who says what, to whom, and when), and the ‘interrelatedness’ of other forms of discourse. I conclude therefore that the rhetoric of extracting, representing, and interpreting these forms of discourse need to be imbued with considerations of this multifaceted nature of verbal art.