When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote
Essays on African-Native American Literature
Ed. (Spring 2003) University of Illinois Press.
This edited collection contains scholarly essays on African-Native American literature. The collection covers a wide range of literatures, from African-Native American mythology among the Seminoles and mixed folktales among the Cherokee to autobiography, fiction, poetry, and captivity narratives from the colonial period to contemporary work. Brennan’s contributions include an introduction which explores the breadth and scholarship of this literary field and the development of several literary genres within an African-Native American literary tradition, and an essay on nineteenth century African-Native American autobiography.
"When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature, a collection of new essays edited by Jonathan Brennan, is a work of original scholarship which uses both historicist and postmodernist presumptions to establish the viability and vitality of the hybrid category of African-Native American culture. Brennan's introduction to the collection makes an excellent case for inquiring beyond African-American or Native American paradigms only, and for studying the history and depth of mutual cultural influence, and sub-cultural interpenetrations...Reading Brennan's introduction is like re-reading a favorite old novel, only to find a new chapter you never noticed before: The Eurocentric paradigm of white/other is displaced by a revisionist history, just off center from what we thought we knew about African and Native Americans, and the enterprise of studying the cultural product suddenly seems richer, more complicated, and more promising than before. There are four sections to the collection, but all the essays essentially do one of two things, and most do them very well. They locate the points of intersection between African and Native American cultures, using analytical and empirical methods, including anthropology, ethnography, and archival research; or they teach us to see as hybrid what we previously presumed to be mono-cultural texts, including literature by canonical American authors." —Dean Franco, Wake Forest University (Mississippi Quarterly, Fall 2004)
"Jonathan Brennan has done Americanists a great service by putting together this collection of ten essays on African-Native American history and literature. The first striking aspect of the edited volume is its extensive introduction-which comprises one-third of the book and includes 269 endnotes. Brennan's introduction presents a thorough account of the historical, political, cultural, and literary connections between what have been considered separate entities in ethnic studies: Americans of African and those of indigenous ancestry...The cumulative effect is the convincing argument that multiethnic literary scholars should move beyond rigidly construed ethnicities to explore the fertile connection between African and Native American cultures...Taken as a whole, however, the volume heralds a "new" path for ethnic studies. It gives the term multiethnic a fresh outlook on the American experience." —Bonnie TuSmith, Northeastern University (Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 32, 2004)
