Theorizing Folklore from the Margins

"Theorizing Folklore from the Margins is an innovative collection of essays that maps the future of Folklore studies. This volume is indeed an important, relevant, ground-breaking contribution to Folklore scholarship. The polyphony of voices that composes Theorizing Folklore from the Margins argues that it is necessary to study the ways in which the creators of folk culture utilize their cultural production and expressions that allow them to create safe spaces that eventually become spaces for liberation and understanding of elements such as race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, (dis)ability, and national identity. "

~Guillermo De Los Reyes, Editor of Gender, Sexuality, and Policy; and author of Getting the Third Degree: Fraternalism, Freemasonry, and History, University of Houston

"Theorizing Folklore from the Margins actively resists monolithic notions attached to cultures and groups through a collection of powerful, multi-authored chapters and "proposes, invites, and offers alternative paths" in folklore studies. This stellar, thought-provoking volume reminds us authority rests with the voices of the people positioned at the margins and that the margins are alive con poder y cultura (with power and culture) and thriving because of it."

~Wanda Addison, Professor, Department of Arts and Humanities, National University

"Theorizing Folklore from the Margins is the book I have wanted since the moment I first learned folklore was a thing. Solimar Otero and Mintzi Martinez-Rivera have assembled a collection that does more than reposition BIPOC theorizing from the margins to the center; it demonstrates that our theory has always been central to a more historically aware, self-critical, and ethically grounded folklore project. Further, this book shows us that the contributions of marginalized communities to critical theoretical conversations are not new. This book, then, is a bridge between the past, present, and future of a renewed Folklore studies in which those once silenced voices demand and deserve a new audience."

~David Todd Lawrence, coauthor of When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri, University of St. Thomas

"This powerful collection of 16 critical essays takes aim at the myriad forms in whichhate, violence, othering, disenfranchisement, etc., manifest in social life as the resultof dominant power structures supported by the "legacies of white supremacy,homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, ableism, and other injustices and forms ofdiscrimination" (19). It is these power structures, among others, that have keptcertain individuals and communities at the margins. The "margins," as presented in thebook, vary by author and range from the physical (such as prisons) to the symbolic (asin the intersections between methodologies and ideas). . . . The result is an illuminating, moving, and reflexivity-inducing work that takes us into and through very different marginal worlds "among, and with, Mexican, Wolof, Native American, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Haitian, Martinican, Andean, North American, African Diaspora, and LGBTQI folk cultures and communities"(13)."

~Julián Antonio Carrillo, University of New Mexico, Journal of Folklore and Education

"Fifty years from now, when scholars look back at the most important contributions to folklore studies in the early twenty-first century, Solimar Otero and Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera's edited volume Theorizing Folklore from the Margins: Critical and Ethical Approaches will rank extremely high. Its publication is a watershed event, one that signals the unapologetic maturation of a critical turn in the discipline. . . . Thanks to the outstanding efforts of Martínez-Rivera, Otero, all the contributors to this volume, and all their intellectual ancestors, the critical turn in folklore studies has arrived. We should all be grateful."

~Stephen Olbrys Gencarella, Journal of Folklore Research