A richly nuanced cultural history of an enigmatic and controversial folktale

Perhaps the best-known version of the tar baby story was published in 1880 in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, and popularized in Song of the South, the 1946 Disney movie. Other versions of the story, however, have surfaced throughout the world, including in Nigeria, Brazil, Corsica, Jamaica, India, and the Philippines. The Tar Baby offers a fresh analysis of this deceptively simple story about a fox, a rabbit, and a doll made of tar and turpentine. Tracing its history and its connections to slavery, colonialism, and global trade, Bryan Wagner explores how the tar baby story, thought to have originated in Africa, came to exist in hundreds of forms on five continents. He concludes with twelve versions of the story transcribed from various cultures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

About the Author
Bryan Wagner is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Disturbing the Peace.

Reviews
"This is an ambitious and meticulously researched study."-Emily Zobel Marshall, Times Literary Supplement
"A lively . . . piece of cultural detective work exploring the history of the tar baby."-Library Journal
"A remarkably rich and wide-ranging book that draws on many histories, geographies, and disciplines in exploring one of the nation's-and the world's-most disturbing but strangely elusive racial stories."-Eric J. Sundquist, author of King's Dream
"Wagner's tar baby is not one we know; his account opens a wider horizon of persuasions and alignments that interrogate the onset of capitalism and the disorienting experience of early globalization."-Hortense J. Spillers, author of Black, White, and in Color



Book Information
ISBN 9780691196916
Author Bryan Wagner
Format Paperback
Page Count 280
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press