Superstitions and Folklore: Bibliography Essay on Superstitions
And Folklore in Charles W. Chesnutt’s Stories Charles Waddell Chesnutt is an African American writer who writes many novels and short stories about African American superstitions and folklore of the south in The Conjure Woman. The Conjure Woman is a collection of folk tales that explore complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War. Chesnutt writes these stories in vernacular forms to represent the oral act of storytelling and express Chesnutt’s black identity and cultural heritage of African American people. Chesnutt 's folktales are narrated either to teach the readers lessons or to represent how African American people are treated by whites as second class citizens. The following essay concentrates on superstitions and folklore in Chesnutt’s stories, and how Chesnutt uses African American folklore to celebrate his black identity throughout telling these stories. I use several scholarly articles which published in different periods. In the essay, “African American Folklore as Racial Project in Charles W. Chesnutt 's The Conjure Woman,” (Western Journal of Black Studies 36.4 [2012]: 325-336), Donald M. Shaffer Jr. argues that Chesnutt’s collection can be considered as a “racial project”. Chesnutt narrates these tales in order to destroy the concept of hierarchy and race in American society. The “race project” can be seen as linkages between the oral act of