The Tar Baby: A Global History

Abstract

In Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, published in 1880 by Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus appeared as the prototype of the wise black storyteller and the humorous philosopher. Uncle Remus also offered new versions of the tar baby tale. Trickster figures such as a fox, a rabbit, and a doll made of tar were at the heart of the different sources for Harris's selected lore. Bryan Wagner wonders if these animals are connected to the Roman de Renard, written seven hundred years before Uncle Remus. Did they belong “to the ‘Master Thief’ story cycle transcribed by Herodotus” (8), as Elsie Clews Parsons's theory suggested? Could the whole tradition “concerned with speaking animals … only have come from Africa”? (4). In the first half of the twentieth century, “the tar baby story remained an important touchstone in the argument for African cultural survivals” (5). Theories related to the hazy diffusion of the story have evolved with time, but no one can say for certain when or where the tar baby stories originated.Rather than primarily concentrating on the background of the Uncle Remus tales, Bryan Wagner explores a broader formula resulting from global trade and colonialism: a global context of interactions related to colonial and racial (but also racist) attitudes. Wagner's analysis offers a counterpoint to specialists who conceive the tar baby story as a remnant of African folklore. Wagner brilliantly leads us through the various origins of the tar baby story, beyond borderlines, thus opening a wide range of perspectives on the treasury of universal folklore. His illuminating and rich study of the tar baby traces the influence of African and African American traditions to explain its varieties throughout the world. He also demonstrates that the tar baby must be understood as a collective experiment, a point illustrated in chapter 1, and so he keys the story to a theory of cultural politics. Wagner's thematic approach extends the significance of the tar baby narrative structure in ethnic and racial terms. As he states, “The theory of cultural politics associated with this interpretation of the tar baby has remained influential, especially in interdisciplinary fields focused on race and ethnicity” (17).The book is divided into five chapters structured to track and study the impact of globalization and the issue of identification at large in the tar baby stories, accompanied by a prologue, an epilogue, and an appendix containing twelve examples of tar baby tales. These examples from different parts of the world (South Africa, Corsica, the Georgia Low Country, Brazil, Bahamas, Philippines, California, Nigeria, Oaxaca, Cape Verde Islands, Colombia, Tanzania) illustrate the scope of the tar baby icon and further highlight the global interpretation the author compellingly demonstrates throughout his study, although this list would have been even more useful if it had supplied a comprehensive comparison of common points and differences. An interpretation of these tales across borders and their links to humor, irony, and complicity within the group is missing and would have complemented the rest of the analysis.Chapter 2 analyzes the issue of identification in the tar baby stories. The different stories, such as the story of the rabbit and the tar wolf (24–26), depict opposite characters (an industrious character and a lazy one) facing a dilemma linked to agriculture or commercial development. This contrast highlights the issue of appropriation, which is challenged by the trickster whose actions are the cause of the conflict. The stories also exemplify the struggle with circumstances, how social conventions were flaunted, and “draw other variables into consideration” (34). Chapter 3 shows how the stories overcome time and space and became part and parcel of the canon of world culture. Tar as object can be understood to symbolically represent labor and raw material, in contrast to technology. Chapter 4 details the tripartite narrative structure of the tar baby stories and their metaphorical approach to resistance and oppression. Wagner asserts that “like the enslaved captive in a war of retribution, the rabbit struggles to free himself by winning back recognition from the tar baby. When this recognition is not forthcoming, the rabbit threatens to turn the tables and kill the tar baby, using violence to break through his alienation” (87). As a matter of fact, the tar baby can provide an understanding of world history. Chapter 5 tackles the theory of politics implied in the rabbit's tactical intelligence and provides a cultural interpretation of the tar baby.Wagner argues that the famous briar patch is the metaphor for instinct versus culture: the symbol of a new social history. As we know, this line of thought was extended when Toni Morrison proposed her interpretation of cultural heritage and response to alienation in her fourth novel, Tar Baby, published in 1981. The briar patch is an allegory of the world as seen and formed by the rabbit. It is a place to escape to but also the symbol of nature versus civilization, a place where the rabbit was born and bred. As Wagner notes, “The briar patch is wild. [It] is unimproved, unincorporated, unenclosed. It is land that belongs to nobody, where nobody survives for long, a remnant from the natural world that existed before the beginning of civilization. What matters to the story is that this grounding in the briar patch is strong enough to arrest the cycle of disorientation that begins in the previous episode” (96–97). I have my reservations about this interpretation because it does not go beyond the binary oppositions of black/white, colonizer/colonized, and dominator/dominated and has by now been superseded by Homi Bhabha's hybridity concept or “third space.” In The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha analyzes the importance of hybridity in cultural studies and develops a theory of the culture of survival, of “people moving in-between cultural traditions and revealing hybrid forms of life and art that do not have a prior existence.”1 This approach is not mentioned by Wagner.Slaves organized themselves according to a set of imposed restraints. After the abolition of slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation, laws restricting access to unenclosed land were repealed, allowing the newly freed slaves access to such areas, a process that appears in the tar baby stories and is particularly well developed in Wagner's analysis. The new laws passed in Georgia around the 1870s, for example, led to a transformation of the landscape and therefore to a transformation of ex-slaves' traditional rights. Former slaves organized themselves collectively to connect with and face the new circumstances, and as the author highlights, “local residents understood that stories like the tar baby were connected to the battles over land, ownership, fencing, enclosure, poaching, and pilfering that were ongoing in Georgia in the late nineteenth century. At the same time as landowners were casting the enclosure campaign as a battle between lazy rabbits and the industrious wolves, ex-slaves and their descendants were turning to stories like the tar baby as a way to understand the attack on their traditional rights to hunt, fish, forage, and graze on unenclosed lands” (109). Local conflicts described in the stories, along with customs, thus took their place in world history and contributed to the tales' global popularity. Expropriation was also strongly linked to capitalism. The epilogue emphasizes once again the universal appeal of stories formed by global trade and colonialism. Wagner understands the tar baby tale as an allegory but also as a comprehensive philosophy of world history.This persuasive analysis of the tar baby stories delivers very detailed arguments on global influences and discards the position advanced during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the origins of the tradition are wholly African. By incorporating transnational perspectives, the book offers a new, enlarged, and original interpretation of race and class in the United States set against the backdrop of the tar baby tales. Wagner has created a valuable archive for cultural transnational studies scholars who are interested in the various influences and sources of the tar baby story. This resource will be particularly beneficial to anyone who works in transnational studies and who wants to further explore the universal appeal of the ongoing burning debates over cultural politics reactivated by Wagner's achievement.