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TITLE: Folklore's Champion: Ben Botkin
SPEAKER: Roger Abrahams
EVENT DATE: 08/15/2007
RUNNING TIME: 64 minutes
DESCRIPTION:
Among Benjamin Botkin's accomplishments, the gathering of slave narratives has received the greatest amount of attention, though not always with his name attached. As folklore editor of the Federal Writers Project, and later head of the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress, Botkin guided the fieldworkers who collected the narratives, amassed and edited the raw materials, and produced 17 bound volumes titled "Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves" (Washington, D.C., 1941). In this lecture, Roger Abrahams discussed this project, Botkin's place in it, its impacton subsequent scholarship, and how one can take these studies further to understand more fully the ways in which the slaves achieved liberation themselves, before and after Emancipation.
Speaker Biography: Roger D. Abrahams is Hum Rosen Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author and editor of many books, including "After Africa" (with John Szwed), "African Folktales: Traditional Stories of the Black World," "Singing the Master: The Emergence of African-American Culture in the Plantation South," "African-American Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World," "Everyday Life: A Poetics of Vernacular Practices" and Man-of-Words in the West Indies."
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SERIES: Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series