Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Yo' Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux: Louisiana Children's Folklore and Play

Yo' Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux: Louisiana Children's Folklore and Play

Soileau, Jeanne Pitre

Paperback

Series: Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World

Mythology & FolkloreBlack American StudiesWomen's Studies

ISBN10: 1496826329
ISBN13: 9781496826329
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: Sep 10 2019
Pages: 218
Weight: 0.72
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Winner of the 2018 Chicago Folklore Prize
and
Winner of the 2018 Opie Prize

Jeanne Soileau, a teacher in New Orleans and south Louisiana for more than forty years, examines how children's folklore, especially among African Americans, has changed. From the tumult of integration to the present, her experience afforded unique opportunities to observe children as they played. With integration in New Orleans during the 1960s, Soileau notes how children began to play with one another almost immediately. Children taught each other play routines, chants, jokes, jump-rope rhymes, cheers, taunts, and teases--all the folk games that happen in normal play on the street and playground. When adults--the judges and attorneys, the parents, and the politicians--haggled and shouted, children began to hold hands in a circle, fall down together to Ring around the Rosie, and tease each other in new and creative ways. Children's ability to adapt can be seen not only in their response to social change, but in how they adopt and utilize pop culture and technology. Vast technological changes in the last third of the twentieth century influenced the way children sang, danced, played, and interacted. Soileau catalogs these changes and studies how games evolve and transform as much as they are preserved. She includes several topics of study: oral narratives and songs, jokes and tales, and teasing formulae gleaned from mostly African American sources. Because much of the field work took place on public school playgrounds, this body of oral narratives remains of particular interest to teachers, folklorists, linguists, and those who study play.

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