Book DescriptionHoward W. Odum (1884-1954), the pioneering social scientist and founder of the University of North Carolina"s department of sociology, played a leading--and well-documented--role in the modernization of the South. Until now, however, there has been no book-length study of Odum"s contributions to southern folklore, which had important but largely unappreciated consequences for his legacy of social justice.
Lynn Moss Sanders shows how Odum, as a collector of African American blues and work songs, anticipated some important precepts of modern folklore. Notably, Odum perceived the benefits of a collaborative and nonhierarchical approach to folk studies. By putting himself in a position to learn from a more tolerant former student and fromone of his black folk informants, Odum became receptive to changing his paternal, segregationist attitudes about race.
Comparing Odum"s two song collections, The Negro and His Songs(1925) and Negro Workaday Songs (1926), Sanders links the growing influence of his coauthor, former student Guy Johnson, to a decrease in instances of racial condescension between the first and second book. Sanders"s comparison of the three "folk" novels in Odum"s Black Ulysses trilogy (completed in 1931) reveals a progressive refinement of Odum"s racial views. Sanders attributes this to Odum"s ability to see John Wesley "Left-Wing" Gordon, the black, working-class model for the trilogy"s hero, as a friend and not simply as a representative of "the Negro."
Odum"s journey took him from authorship of Social and Mental Traits of the Negro (1910), now a relic of scientific racism, to his final publication, Agenda for Integration. His life and career form a remarkable story of how folklore changed the folklorist--a change felt by a whole generation of southern liberals whose work Odum encouraged and shaped. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Howard W. Odum's Folklore Odyssey: Transformation to Tolerance Through African American Folk Studies (Lynn Moss Sanders)