Archive of African American Folklore

Co-Directors Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Maria Tatar

https://afamfolklore.fas.harvard.edu

The Archive of African American Folklore aims to create a space for collecting tales and exchanging ideas about them. Much of what was told in African American storytelling circles, both at workplaces and at sites of leisure, took the form of what folklorists call ephemeral cultural property, passed on from one generation to the next, but rarely written down. The site aims to preserve the wisdom and lore of times past, showing how it has not performed a vanishing act but has been kept alive, in song and story, in conversations and performances, as well as in new expressive forms ranging from film to rap.

The creation of the Archive of African American Folklore was initiated in 2017 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Harvard University) and Maria Tatar (Harvard University), co-authors of Annotated African American Folktales (W.W. Norton, 2017).