“‘Nothing but Pleasant Memories of the Discipline of Slavery”: The Trickster and the Dynamics of Racial Representation.’

The anarchic trickster spider Anansi, whose origins can be traced back to West Africa, is predominantly found in Anglophone Caribbean folktales, while Brer Rabbit, who originates from South, Central and East Africa, is popular across the French-speaking Caribbean and USA. Brer Rabbit tales entered white American mainstream culture in the late nineteenth century through Joel Chandler Harris’s ‘Uncle Remus’ collections. Harris, whose collections are replete with nostalgia for the plantation past, explains to readers that Uncle Remus, the contented enslaved storyteller, has “nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery” (Harris 1880 xvii). In 1926, American ethnomusicologist Helen Roberts proclaimed that while Brer Rabbit had become “byword of our own nurseries”, due to their ever-increasing popularity, “there has been no Harris for Anansi” (Roberts 244). Through scrutinising representations of Anansi in late-nineteenth-century collections in Jamaica and Brer Rabbit tales collected during the same period in the American South, this essay compares the very different trajectories of the two trickster figures. It explores how variances in cultural and political context have affected interpretations of the trickster folktales and suggests that having “no Harris for Anansi” was key to the continued sense of pride and ownership felt by African decedents in the Anglophone Caribbean for their trickster folk-hero, in contrast to the problematic racial representations the American Brer Rabbit still provokes