Fairy tales have been retold, rewritten, and reproduced across media for centuries. Although traditionally, fairy tales have championed reproductive future by celebrating the heteronormative “happily ever-after,” indicated by the union between heterosexual couples, Queer rewritings of fairy tales and scholarship on this matter are not completely scarce in the West. There is, however, a dearth of Queer fairy tales for the Desi audience, and naturally, therefore, limited scholarship available on the matter….The absence of Queer fairy tales in traditional Indian folklore keeps Queerness invisible in the cognitive landscape of children while perpetuating heteronormativity.
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Folklorists
Toppling the Tables:
South Asian regional cinema has consistently served as a medium for exploring the multifaceted nature of identity and complex social structure. Currently, amid the newly emerging film genres, a subgenre of horror, featuring supernatural entities, illuminates the role of religious belief and narratives in shaping South Asian worldviews. The emergence of such films topples the East/West dichotomies, by bringing to the forefront the dynamics between the regional/vernacular and the dominant/mainstream within the Indian context. Therefore, this study proposes an appendage of intersectionality to subalternity, arriving at the framework of intersectional subalternity, manifesting at the level of ideas and ideologies to study the movement from the periphery to the center in the South Asian cinematic genre.
From the Editor
Folklore, not confined to boundaries of nationalism,
homogeneity, and diversity, manifests across
digital platforms, like TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook,
shaping how people navigate in the virtual
era. These platforms enable rapid dissemination
of cultural expressions, transcending geographical
and temporal boundaries. The shift challenges the
approach to studying and defining folklore.
From the Director
We are pleased and honored to introduce Rasel Ahmed, our Fall-Winter 2023 special issue editor. In early 2023, New York Folklore issued a Call for Proposals for guest editors and identified two talented emerging folklorists. Each proposed a specific theme or focus, with Rasel Ahmed’s issue focusing on folklore in a transnational context.
Commentary:
In a 1935 letter to his fellow pulp fiction author and one-time collaborator E. Hoffman Price, Howard Phillips Lovecraft explained that he “always preferred to use established folklore legends as little as possible” and strove to “invent his own fantastic violations of natural law” (Lovecraft 1976). This statement might surprise both casual and longtime readers of Lovecraft and his genre breaking horror and science fiction.
From the Director
In early 2023, New York Folklore put out a Call for guest editors for our journal. Each potential guest editor proposed a special issue with a specific theme or focus. Two talented folklorists are being featured for the 2023 issues of Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore. This issue, by Sarah Shultz, has its focus on foodways.
Chicago Folklore Prize Winner:
On behalf of the New York Folklore Society’s executive board and the editorial
board of Voices, I want to congratulate Faye McMahon for winning the American
Folklore Society’s 2008 Chicago Folklore Prize with her outstanding book Not Just Child’s Play: Emerging Tradition and the Lost Boys of Sudan, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2007. It brings all of us great happiness to see Faye receive this richly deserved award….According to the American Folklore Society’s web site, the Chicago Folklore Prize, “awarded to the author of the best book-length work of folklore scholarship for the year, is the oldest international award recognizing excellence in folklore scholarship.”
Dynamic yet Fragile:
Archives, historical societies, and museums
today have inherited the task
of caring for a swelling mass of audiovisual
materials. A 2005 Heritage Health Index
survey calculated a staggering 2,423,568
moving image collections and 2,189,992
audio collections safeguarded within the
United States alone. Alarmingly, more than
40 percent of audio and video collections
are maintained in unknown conditions. The
same report concluded that many cultural
institutions lack essential resources to care
for these artifacts. These collections are
in peril if left unattended, as over time the
fragile plastic-coated tapes can deteriorate
and fail to play.
From the Editor
A Call to Action.
Just before the new
year, along with hundreds of arts nonprofits across
the state, the New York
Folklore Society received
alarming news. New
York State’s deficit reduction
plan instituted in December 2008 included
extensive cuts to a number of state programs—
including the grants budget of the
New York State Council on the Arts. The cuts
to NYSCA meant that pending requests for
fiscal year 2008–9 funding, including the New
York Folklore Society’s request for general operating
support, could not be considered.
From the Director
Our History. The New York Folklore Society was founded in 1944 by a group of folklorists, historians, writers, and enthusiasts—dreamers and visionaries emerging from the Great Depression. Sharing a vision for cultural democracy after World War II, they felt that it was essential to collect, save, and share the folk arts and cultural traditions of the many cultures that made up the urban and rural areas of the state, its historic regions, and the American literary traditions it inspired. The founders’ goal was to “plow back”: to give back traditional arts to the people who created and maintained them.
Fieldwork, Memory, and the Impact of 9/11 on an Eastern Tennessee Klansman:
I wish to share a personal account
of my first folkloristic encounter: the series
of events that led to my choice of a
career in folklore. While many folklorists
may recall their excitement and fascination
with their first informants and the unique
narratives or artifacts that they produced,
my tale involves near-accidental fieldwork
in the company of a less-than-savory group
in American society: the Ku Klux Klan
(KKK).
From the Director
As we look back
on our organization’s
sixty-fifth year,
I would like to thank
all of our supporters
on behalf of the entire
New York Folklore
Society family.
2009 was a year of
great upheaval and rethinking of the organization….Partnerships in
2009 … helped us to realize programming goals: Union College, the Albany Institute
for History and Art, the City of Schenectady,
and the Erie Canalway National Heritage
Corridor were invaluable in helping us to
continue to provide folklore and folk arts
programming
From the Editor
The articles featured
in this issue of Voices
contain a variety of
voices whose messages
are “traditional”—in the
surprising, the comforting,
and even the most
alarming senses of that disciplinary keyword. In the photo essay “Carving Out a Life:
Reflections of an Ithaca Wood-Carver,”
self-taught carver Mary Michael Shelley describes
how she responded simultaneously
to her Northeastern farm family heritage,
liberal arts education, and the emerging
feminism of her time to claim a form of
man’s work—carpentry and carving…
Downstate
Why do folklorists and scholars of
play so rarely explore the playful aspects
of sex? Perhaps, as I’ve always suspected,
a prudish element runs through the discipline.
Or perhaps, despite the similarities,
sex and children’s play seem to exist in separate
universes. Nonetheless, any folklorist
or ethnographer seeking to understand
New York City, in particular, can’t do so
without acknowledging a side of the city’s
life that attracts people from all over the
world for its anonymity and permissiveness.
The Grateful Terrorist:
The folktale of the grateful dead was
once widely known and passed on through
both religious and secular traditions. Today
most people would conjure an image of
the popular rock band, which is said to
have found its name from this story, as
well…. The story has evolved
throughout history in response to society’s
psychological coping needs during times
of crisis. This mythic theme has resurfaced
from the earliest Judaic scriptures to
contemporary urban legends.