Folklorist of The Month - December 2020 – TODD LAWRENCE
Published by: Lamont Pearley Editor of The African American Folklorist Newspaper
David Todd Lawrence - Folklorist of The Month
In this issue, I interview our current African American Folklorist of the month Dr. David Todd Lawrence Associate Professor in American culture and Difference English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. Todd teaches African American literature and culture, folklore studies, and cultural studies. He was recently honored at the Annual American Folklore Society’s conference for the project “The George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art” which Lawrence and the team he’s part of called the “Urban Art Mapping Project” took to the streets to begin preserving and documenting the street arts and emotions of the community after George Floyds death, culminating into an entire community effort. Check out the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art database https://georgefloydstreetart.omeka.net/
LJP
I would like to introduce welcome and speak with the Folklorist of this upcoming month issue. Todd lawns hi doing, sir.
DTL
I’m doing great, man. I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on.
LJP
Thank you for accepting to be on. We had we met at the American folklore society annual meeting. And right and we we spoke via email with a plethora of other great folklorist for quite some time. And so we galvanized the African American folklore section, part of the American folklore society. So I want everyone to know that some guys can also join the AFS and remember the bio section you can find the section group on Facebook the American folklore society slash African American folklore section now with all those great banter out of the way, let’s get into your journey. Good brother. Haven’t you, matter of fact, tell us what you do right now? What your position is? Give us a nice bio.
DTL
Okay, so I am Todd Lawrence. I teach African American folk, African American culture and literature, folklore, and Cultural Studies at the University of St. Thomas, which is in St. Paul, Minnesota. I’ve been at University of St. Thomas for my entire career. I did my graduate work my PhD graduate work at the University of Missouri. So I went to St. Thomas right after I got done in Missouri. So I’ve been here for almost, this might be my 19th year I think. I’m starting my 19th year at University of St. Thomas. Yeah, yeah. They haven’t got rid of me yet. I think if you do it, if you’re doing a good job, they’re always thinking about like, how can we get rid of this guy? That’s. So yes, I’ve been there for a long time. I teach a lot of different classes I teach the majority of what I teach is African American literature. And within African American literature, I focus mainly on sort of mid century black genre writing, so I do a lot of stuff in like, mystery novels, crime, novels, things like that. I also,
LJP
Black noir is you are what you’re saying?
DTL
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Yeah. So but I, you know, I’m the only African American so in my department. So when that’s the case, you teach a little bit of everything. So I teach all the way back to the beginning of African American literature. I don’t really do African literature. But we try to sort of keep that, that connection alive and when we’re talking about African American literature. So but yeah, go all the way back to you know, Phyllis Wheatley and, and all those all those folks back in back in the day. So
LPJ
you know, unless something interesting, forgive me, I’m just getting just in case, I have to jot something down for one of your statements that are harder to get, I had to get by no book. Interesting. And I think that’s one of the reasons I have met the I don’t see there. So let me pose it as a question. Do you believe in more of these situations, collegiate university departments as well as organizations like AFS the kind of group the time to ask for together rather than giving each it’s own ah respected length?
DTL
Todd at Rally
I don’t know if I’d say that or not. I mean, I think you know, so five understand your question, right? You know, if you’re teaching if you’re working in academia, in fact, they actually, I was just talking about this with a friend the other day, the other day, the tendency is to really separate, let’s say, an African American literature, it’s just sort of separate our literature in general, to separate it up into the sort of areas of African American and Native American, and you know, you know, medieval British or whatever. So we have these kind of special areas, specialized areas that people teach in. But what tends to happen when you’re at smaller universities is that you end up really crossing over and doing a lot of things. And that’s, it’s not just small university. So people over the course of their careers by themselves interested in particular things. And I think English studies, which is a department, that’s my department, I’m an English Studies Department tends to really be really broad in what you can do in a department like that. So, and a lot of places folklorist find themselves in it in an English department. And so, you know, English folklore fits into, you know, what happens in an English department, because you’re really studying storytelling language, and kind of like composition, but oral composition, right, like, so it all fits together. So I think, you know, sometimes we would, I would like to have, I’m the kind of person who is interested in a lot of different things. In in my teaching in my work, you know, to try to find, like, what’s the thing that really holds it all together? It really is sort of its African American folklore, and African American culture. But it’s really narrative, because I mean, I’ve even done projects where I’m not even focusing on African Americans, right. Like, I’ve, I’ve done ethnographic project projects where it was just like, working on the idea of home for people in a certain city, or something like that, you know, so, I mean, I do a lot of different things. I mean, I suppose what I say sometimes when I’m thinking about myself as a folklorist is, I’m really an ethnography, and to think about myself as an ethnography means that I’m not really limited by I have to be doing ethnography on this group of people or this certain kind of, of genre focal or something like that. It’s really, I like to do ethnography I’d like to sort of engage with, with groups of people with communities, and, you know, sort of collaborate with them and have them to share with me, things that are important about their experience. And that can vary, you know, that the groups can vary, what thing that they’re sharing can vary, it can vary, you know, they might be telling you stories, they might be telling you about jokes, or they might be telling you about, you know, whether it’s like a kind of narrative of, you know, I’ve done a project, my probably my biggest project is really about disaster narratives and counter narratives of blackness and in a community that whose time was destroyed. Right, you know, so, I mean, that that book is really all about, you know, the narrative that the people at the town, tell about their towns, inception, but also about all the stories that have kept their town alive over the years and continue to keep their community alive. Even if there is after there is no more time. They had to move to a different place, or they’re dispersed across the country, because they’re not living in the same place anymore. But they engage in this tradition of homecoming, which a lot of African American communities do, right? In the summertime, this time of year, get together, everybody comes back. And so they had a real vibrant homecoming tradition. And so that’s one of the ways that they keep their community alive, even though they don’t live in the same town anymore. That place where they all grew up, where they really felt rooted to, nobody lives there anymore, you know, so, like that. I don’t know if that explains exactly,
LJP
No, that does.
As they say a loaded statement, because there was so much to unpack right, in a good way, you know,
DTL
you might have to stop me sometimes.
LJP
No, no, no, because that’s what this is about. The great thing is, speaking of narrative, you have to be able to talk to tell the story, right? So, you mentioned quite a few things here. But I want to unpack I don’t know which one to go into, first, from from answering the question, why folklore, especially as I see it, and I could be wrong. On a PhD level usually not always falls in line with English because it’s based on literature and vernacular. But here’s something I really want before we even touch that or even return to that. You made a clear distinction between ethnography ethnographer, and folklorist and folklore. Could you explain it but I would like you to go a little bit more in deep because one of the purposes of this platform is to inform the layperson who does this work and don’t even realize they’re doing the work. Yeah, Right?
DTL
Yeah. So it’s really a I mean, I guess in a way, it’s a big distinction, but in a way it’s a it’s a small distinction. ethnography is a methodology, right? Like it’s the research methodology that folklorist used to study what they study. So it’s a difference between saying, like there are folklorist who specialize in Proverbs, for example. And so if you ask them, like, what’s your specialty? What are you an expert on? They would say, I’m an expert on Proverbs, there might be there, folklorist who specialize in contemporary legend, and even particular kinds of contemporary legends. And so if you ask them, What is your specialty, they might say, Well, my specialty is contemporary legends connected to healthcare, and doctors or something like that. Right? Other people might say, Well, I’m an expert on jokes, joke cycles or something like that, right? And I’m not really an expert on any particular like genre of folklore or like any particular folklore genre, or any particular group of people. That’s another thing that people might say that they’re an expert on. Certainly in the past that was more more common for people to say, like, what if someone says, What did you What do you Who do you work? Or what do you what do you work on? They might say, Well, I suppose I work with this particular group of people, you know, and usually, it was a group of people that other right, that’s not it? Yeah, it’s not like, you know, this particular neighborhood around the corner, it was like these people who live on a, on an island across an ocean somewhere. And I’m an expert on them, that was pretty common for people to say that that way back in the day,
LJP
Right, right.
DTL
It’s less likely to say something like that now, because that’s a sort of remnant of a kind of colonialist history of our discipline. But what I’m saying is, like, I’m not really an expert. Yeah, we definitely come back to that. But I’m not really an expert in that I, I, I’m, I just think of myself as a as an ethnographer. Meaning I would I, whatever I’m doing, I’m doing ethnography. So ethnography, meaning like, collaborating with groups of people to understand their culture, their stories, that any any parts of their culture, whether it’s like their whole culture, whether some small aspect of their culture, whether it’s something that happened to them, etc, etc. So I think much more about ethnography as a methodology, and like, how we should do it, and what it takes to do it properly, and how difficult it is to do it properly. And what are the kind of dynamics that we should be thinking about that, that we actually engage in when we’re doing ethnography? So I think about that much more than I think about any particular group of people or any particular genre or something like that. So that’s why I say that say it that way. And the other thing is, you know, I would say, you know, for me as a scholar, and I kind of said this a little bit before, um, I’m not one of those scholars that’s going to tell you, I do this. And that’s what I do. That’s what I’m an expert on. Like, if you thought, well, let’s find the who’s the scholar on Ralph Ellison. Well, I’m not like I’m not like an expert on one particular author. On the English side, I’m not an expert on any particular genre. On the folklore side, I’m, I’m thinking more in terms of, you know, methodology when it comes to folklore. And I’m thinking more in terms of like, broad genres when it comes to literature. And generally, like, if I had to say, in literature, what I really am interested in a write the most about it’s, it’s people who are outside, right? It’s even within African American literature and culture, it’s outsiders, it’s people who are oppositional to the mainstream, which I suppose right, right subcultures for sure. I suppose you could argue that all black people are in some ways, oppositional, but, but I’m thinking of even within, within black culture. You know, I, when I started out, when I first got a job, I was writing a lot about pimps and pimp culture, right. And then, you know, so then I got into, and I got into, you know, my dissertation is on the Black Arts Movement. So that was, you know, revolutionaries, you know, and that sort of culture of the 60s, right, you know, the Black Power movement and all that and see how that worked through literature, how that worked through, you know, drama, and poetry and all that kind of stuff. And so I’ve always sort of been looking at people who are sort of on the outside sort of pushing against the sort of accepted way of being so
LJP
what well, you know, that’s all well, it’s pretty revolutionary in itself, right, looking at those who are revolutionaries, and seeing how the movement shaped or reshapes what’s considered pop culture, right. I want to talk to you about your transition, if that is what is into folklore, because a lot of people that have had the honor to interview kind of stumbled into folklore based on something they were interested in a good portion comes out of literature or English. But as strong as your literary background is which I have to commend you, because that’s real, old school. We need more of that. Now, I really believe how can I say this about sound at Harvard know people read a lot of things will be different.
But that’s not here nor there. How did you get into the folklore space? Was it African American History, where the literature was it the pimp revolution with it the Black Power revolution? You know, how did he did you know you were a folklorist or ethnographer?
DTL
I will be like most of those other people you can talk to I sort of stumbled into it. I didn’t. I don’t think I knew what folklore was, or really had any kind of cognizance of folklore until I was in PhD school. So at the undergraduate level, I did a master’s degree to I was African American literature. That’s what I what I was interested in. And I got into PhD school at the University of Missouri and university, Missouri. At the time at a folklore program. Elaine lawless was there, Anand Prahlad and a couple of other folks were there. But I didn’t go there to study folklore. I went there to study Mark Twain actually, which is might be strange. I kind of like I didn’t really have a focus necessarily, but I did. I had, you know, sort of talk there was a famous Twain scholar there named Tom Quirk. And it’s sort of been talking to him and found out about him and wanted to study Mark Twain and maybe American realism, something like that. So they were kind of they were pretty strong in American literature at the time. That’s really what I went there for. But really, once I got there, I just started to see I met some folklorist, and they were doing really cool work. And then I took a class, I think, I can’t remember which one was the first one I took, it might have been something like, it was probably feminist ethnography or something like that. I took that was with Elaine, I took a class. The rhetoric of was like the rhetoric of the blues, reggae and the blues, I think with Prahlad, you know, and that was really suffused with folklore. And I started to realize, like, the stuff I’m really, really, really interested in, I can do it in folklore, and nobody’s gonna give me any trouble about it. Because there have been times when I was, you know, reading and talking and writing about American literature when I was saying things, you know, in class, like, well, this is racist, right? Like I, you know, I was sort of put, and people be like, Well, you can’t talk about that, you know, like, at the time that was 25 years ago, you know,
LJP
Right, it was Taboo.
DTL
Right. They were saying, telling me what I couldn’t say, are telling me like, that’s not what we do, or something like that, you know, there were lots of instances of that. And in folklore, no one ever said that, you know, I would be like, let me write about black preachers, or, let me write about, you know, you know, the sort of mysticism rah, Rastafari mysticism around Marcus Garvey, or something like that, you know, a whole like, once I got in, I had this whole thing was writing about Marcus Garvey all the time, and I was really fascinated with how Rastafari talked about him. And, and in the other elements of their belief, which were, you know, so much sort of traditional, and oral, the nature and so I just like, you couldn’t do that anywhere else. Maybe in religious studies, maybe. And there were some crossovers, you know, so and there were, you know, religious studies as a department, there were other departments on campus that their, their students came into classes in folklore, you know, with Elaine and Prahlad, as well. And so we started to really have those kind of, like, connections between students in our program and other other departments. And I just really loved it. I just felt liberated. I felt like I could do the work that I wanted to do. I could read and study things that were really interesting to me. And most importantly, I really started to realize that I come from folklorists and that I’ve been around folklore I mean, everybody has but I mean, for me, it really became really, really start to me that I’ve been around you know, the stuff my whole life and I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what to call it. My dad is like a proverb, master and a lot of ways Right, but my grandma’s you know, the storytelling, you know, like keepers of the, of the tradition I come from, from a small town in Missouri, a small black town called Pennytown, it actually, no one lives there anymore. But, you know, black people came to this town in the late late 1860s and started a town in Central Missouri. Right. And, and my grandmother was a sort of historian and she grew up there, but she became like, the historian, preservationist of the history and the traditions of this place. Wow, I didn’t really understand her. Right, yeah, yeah, in a way. Absolutely. And I didn’t really understand why it was important when I was younger. And, and, you know, as I as I got older, and as I got into folklore, and start to realize, like, Oh, this is like, this is what a homecoming tradition is, this is what these songs mean, this is what these stories are. And then you know, more and more and more, especially as I did more work as a folklorist, I started to see the ways in which it connected to my own experience, and my own family, and my own personal history. And it became even more more powerful for me. So in a way, is helped me to connect my own experience in life and all that to my work in a way that I never would have really been able to do if I was, you know, writing about, you know, Mark Twain or anybody else whose name I can’t remember right now, but you don’t you know, what I’m saying?
LJP
So, definitely leads me to a question. Do You think that we’ve lost in the last maybe 15 years? Because, you know, everything being so expensive, especially certain places in town is working and kids not necessarily staying with their grandparents, as much as they used to at least that’s what’s portrayed in the last year or two. I’ve seen a lot of traditional families. But outside of that, do you think that that could be why? Well, not that could be what you think that’s the issue in regards to keeping the family stories and traditions alive? Also, do you think if the term folklore and ethnography was introduced to individuals at a younger age, when their grandparents are sharing things with parents and uncles and aunts are sharing these things? They would be more receptive to it at a younger age? I know that two double edged questions, take which ever one you want first?
DTL
No, I think it’s a good question. I think. So I think there’s a couple of aspects of that that are important to highlight. You know, the first thing is that we all have folklore, whether we are aware of it or not. And you know, what tends to happen is people don’t know that they have folklore. I mean, like you’re saying, like, nobody tells you, oh, that story that you’re telling, that’s folklore, or Oh, that, you know, urban legend that you’re passing around. That’s folklore. Oh, that, you know, conspiracy theory, that you’re telling all your friends that’s folklore or this, you know, nobody’s there to sort of point that out. Because folklore exists in the lives and everyday experiences of people as they’re sort of in their communities and doing their thing. But then folklore exist as a kind of like, academic, you know, sort of category in the, in the university where people are studying it. Right. So, I mean, I think if there was there, there are ways to break down that barrier between like, Hello, I’m the I’m the professor and I want to study your folklore.
A lot of our a lot of our public sector, friends and folklore have done really great work in breaking down that barrier, right. Like, they’re running organizations, nonprofits, you know, you know, quasi government entities, whatever, whether they’re on the ground, with people, engaging with them in their everyday lives, with those traditions and things that they’re doing around, whether it’s around art, whether it’s music, whether it’s on storytelling, whether it’s around adornment, whatever it is, you know, like, people don’t, you know, what might not think the clothes that you’re making, to wear or the your, your, your choices about how you’re going to adorn yourself, when you go out into public. Like, that’s folklore. That’s, that’s something in so they’re, they’re an everyday part of our lives that we kind of don’t think about, you know, think like, Oh, this is special. Often, you know, it’s our family members, you know, older family members, like you said, so I think that’s kind of a part of the question. You’re asking is, are we less, we have less time with our older family members, the people who sort of carry the tradition. That might be true and, and maybe we’re not understanding the ways in which those things are important. But the truth is like, there’s something else like if you’re young kid, and like myself, I’ll just use myself as an example. So if you’re a young kid like me, and you come from this sort of place, that you didn’t quite understand, like, what’s the importance of the stories? Why is everybody going out on the first Sunday of August to celebrate homecoming, we sing these particular songs, we, you know, the preacher gives this particular sermon, etc, etc, that you don’t understand. You might think, well, that that kid is disconnected from the traditions of his of his family and family history, that could be true. But also that kid still has its own folklore too, right? Like, that kid has more of his friend groups of his sub cultural groups of the music that he loves of the art that moves him of the way that he dresses, that’s all folklore, too, right. So we, you know, I just always like to make sure to stress to my students that you don’t get too focused on thinking of folklore as old stuff. And new stuff, the stuff that’s happening in your life right now is not folklore. That’s not true. And I think, you know, I don’t think it’s actually true, the more ways that there are to communicate, the more ways there are to, to spread folklore. You know, I mean, there was a time, not too long ago, when, you know, folklorists would say, you know, when I was in school, they taught us, folklore can never be written down, out to be transmitted orally, you’ve got to it’s got to be someone telling a story to someone else. It’s got to be someone doing a performance in front of someone else. It’s got to be in person. It’s got to be orally transmitted. And then some folks were like, wait a minute, what about the internet? And these early, you know, and then in the day, people were like, no, can’t be the internet, you know. And now you’ve got folks like, Trevor Blank, and people like that around the country who’ve been writing about folklore and the internet. And you’ve made the argument and have won that argument, that there’s folklore, online, like, and we all see it memes or folklore. You know, like, there’s all kinds of these form letters, everything out there, all kinds of stuff that’s written, that’s folklore, as well. So we’ve had to sort of change the way that we think about these things, and that a lot of that came from this idea that folklore was old, and it was what people who were preliterate like they were they were oral cultures, they had folklore, people who were, who were educated and write didn’t have folklore. That’s not true. We’ve seen that that’s not true, right. And so what we have now is we live in a world where the ways that we can communicate with each other are, like, endless, and there’s folklore. In each one of those things. There’s folklore on apps, you know, that there’s folk folklore everywhere, right? So to me, that just means that everything that we have available to us just sort of amplifies the kinds of folklore that that can be and how it functions in our everyday lives. So our lives are changing you as you’re saying, like, the social realities of our life are changing, we’re not necessarily staying at home with our grandparents or running around on the farm, or, you know, like all the stuff that people used to do, I suppose our lives are definitely changing. But there’s still folklore there. I think the one way that it might really impact us is if we don’t have people saying, hey, that’s important. You know, this thing that you think isn’t important, actually is important, you know, the story that such and such as telling or this particular, you know, heat history or joke or whatever, and that was me, you know, like my dad used to say, these rhymes, you know, all these rhymes all the time. And I’d be like, why he’s saying these rhymes dad, you know, and then like, later, I was like, Yeah, I was like, Oh, my God, this is these are amazing things. You know, these are these sort of, formulaic you know, kind of, like, you know, he would always say things like, oh, like, I’m not gonna be able to remember one right now, but he had all these runs about like, when you do you know, things people say, like, now you’re cooking with gas and things like that, but he had like, hundreds of these, you know, for every particular occasion where you hand me this, yes, and the blind man is right, and I’d be like, What is he talking about? And then I started realize, like, oh, man, those things are like, Where did that come from? Where did he you know, and started to ask him about that. Maybe I don’t know. I just, my dad used to say them or something like that. Right? And then there it is, right. And now you just be like, Oh, that’s important. That could be that could be revealing on something that could be something that’s interesting to look at. And if you’re his son like me, you end up finding yourself saying those things right? Like, oh my god, did I just say too? Right? You know, because it just passed on. Right. So anyway as a super long answer, but…
Full Interview will be posted soon
