Our fascination with the trickster figure, whose presence is global, stems from our desire to break free from the tightly regimented structures of our societies. Condemned to conform to laws and rules imposed by governments, communities, social groups and family bonds, we revel in the fantasy of the trickster whose energy and cunning knows no bounds and for whom nothing is sacred. One such trickster is Brer Rabbit, who was introduced to North America through the folktales of enslaved Africans. On the plantations, Brer Rabbit, like Anansi in the Caribbean, functioned as a resistance figure for the enslaved whose trickery was aimed at undermining and challenging the plantation regime. Yet as Brer Rabbit tales moved from the oral tradition to the printed page in the late nineteenth-century, the trickster was emptied of his potentially powerful symbolism by white American collectors, authors and folklorists in their attempt to create a nostalgic fantasy of the plantation past. American Trickster offers readers a unique insight into the cultural significance of the Brer Rabbit trickster figure, from his African roots and through to his influence on contemporary culture. Exploring the changing portrayals of the trickster figure through a wealth of cultural forms including folktales, advertising, fiction and films the book scrutinises the profound tensions between the perpetuation of damaging racial stereotypes and the need to keep African-American folk traditions alive. Emily Zobel Marshall argues that Brer Rabbit was eventually reclaimed by twentieth-century African-American novelists whose protagonists ‘trick’ their way out of limiting stereotypes, break down social and cultural boundaries and offer readers practical and psychological methods for challenging the traumatic legacies of slavery and racism.

Coyote insists the crows teach him how to fly, but the experience ends in diaster.

In the original graphic anthology of Native American trickster tales, Trickster brings together Native American folklore and the world of comics. This inspired collaboration pairs twenty-four native storytellers with twenty-four accomplished artists, telling cultural tales from across North America.

Native American tricksters can be buffoons, transformers, social critics, teachers, and mediators between human beings, nature, and the gods. A vibrant part of American Indian tradition, the trickster has shown a remarkable ability to adapt into the twenty-first century. In Living Sideways, Franchot Ballinger provides the first full-length study of the diverse roles and dimensions of North American Indian tricksters. While honoring their diversity and complexity, he challenges stereotypical Euro-American treatments of tricksters. Drawing from the most influential scholarship on Native American tricksters, Ballinger shows how many critics have failed to consider both the specifics of trickster stories and their cultural contexts. Each chapter concentrates on a particular aspect of the trickster theme, such as the trickster’s ambiguous personality, the variety of trickster roles, and the trickster’s role as social critic. Ballinger further considers issues of sex, gender, and humor, the use of trickster tales as instructions on social values and community control, and the trickster as an emblem of modern Indian survival. Living Sideways also includes illustrative trickster stories at the end of each chapter, a comprehensive bibliography, and discussion of the literary aspects of tricksters. Examining both the sacred power of tricksters and the stories as literature, Living Sideways is the most thorough book to date on Native American tricksters.

Tricksters are known by their deeds. Obviously not all the examples in American Tricksters are full-blown mythological tricksters like Coyote, Raven, or the Two Brothers found in Native American stories, or superhuman figures like the larger-than-life Davy Crockett of nineteenth-century tales. Newer expressions of trickiness do share some qualities with the Trickster archetype seen in myths. Rock stars who break taboos and get away with it, heroes who overcome monstrous circumstances, crafty folk who find a way to survive and thrive when the odds are against them, men making spectacles of themselves by feeding their astounding appetites in public--all have some trickster qualities. Each person, every living creature who ever faced an obstacle and needed to get around it, has found the built-in trickster impulse. Impasses turn the trickster gene on, or stimulate the trick-performing imagination--that's life. To explore the ways and means of trickster maneuvers can alert us to pitfalls, help us appreciate tricks that are entertaining, and aid us in fending off ploys which drain our resources and ruin our lives. Knowing more about the Trickster archetype in our psyches helps us be more self-aware.

Of all the characters in myths and legends told around the world, it's the wily trickster who provides the real spark in the action, causing trouble wherever he goes. This figure shows up time and again in Native American folklore, where he takes many forms, from the irascible Coyote of the Southwest, to Iktomi, the amorphous spider man of the Lakota tribe. This dazzling collection of American Indian trickster tales, compiled by an eminent anthropologist and a master storyteller, serves as the perfect companion to their previous masterwork, American Indian Myths and Legends. American Indian Trickster Tales includes more than one hundred stories from sixty tribes--many recorded from living storytellers—which are illustrated with lively and evocative drawings. These entertaining tales can be read aloud and enjoyed by readers of any age, and will entrance folklorists, anthropologists, lovers of Native American literature, and fans of both Joseph Campbell and the Brothers Grimm.

"Brilliant. Smith shows us how to bridge and link authors into an understanding of contemporary American literature that occupies shared ground, yet she insists on the imperative of educating ourselves in many U.S. traditions. The result is a book that meets the extremely difficult challenge of working multiculturally without either erasing or overdetermining difference. This discussion will have applications well beyond the group of authors discussed here."--Elizabeth Ammons, coeditor of Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature: A Multicultural Perspective "Transcultural and thoroughly documented, this study of contemporary ethnic texts by women is comparative in the most scholarly sense. No reader of modern American fiction could argue against its trickster premises: the power to laugh at old worlds, and invent new ones."--Kenneth Lincoln, author of Indi'n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America "Communicates keen insights on fictional techniques and cultural themes in clear, elegant and jargon-free language. I believe that this study will serve as an excellent model for future multicultural literary criticism."--Bonnie TuSmith, author of All My Relatives "Highly accessible to a diverse audience, Writing Tricksters forces readers to examine the power of storytelling traditions to cultural and individual survival. Smith's cross-cultural discussion of the trickster is right on the cusp of an important, evolving analytical direction."--Alanna Kathleen Brown, Montana State University "Few scholars have attempted to find the lines of contact and connection between ethnic writers. Writing Tricksters is fresh and original, an important addition to the growing corpus of truly multicultural critical texts."--Joseph Skerrett, coeditor of Memory, Narrative, and Identity

In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde brings to life the playful and disruptive side of human imagination as it is embodied in trickster mythology. He first visits the old stories—Hermes in Greece, Eshu in West Africa, Krishna in India, Coyote in North America, among others—and then holds them up against the lives and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Duchamp, Ginsberg, John Cage, and Frederick Douglass. Twelve years after its first publication, Trickster Makes This World—authoritative in its scholarship, loose-limbed in its style—has taken its place among the great works of modern cultural criticism. This new edition includes an introduction by Michael Chabon.

"Trickster Academy is a full-length collection of poems that explore the experience of being Native in Academia-from land acknowledgment statements to the criteria for tenure and the histories of using Native American remains within Anthropology. Organized around the premise of the Trickster Academy, a university space run by and meant for training "tricksters," this collection moves between the personal dynamics of a two-spirit Indigenous woman in spaces where there are few others, and a "trickster's" critique of those same spaces. But these realities aren't specific only to those in academic positions-from leaving home, to being the only Indian in the room, to having to deal with the constant pressures to being a 'real Indian', they are shared experiences of Indians across many different regions, and all of us who live among tricksters"--

The 1992 Quincentennial of the encounter between the New World and the Old resulted in a veritable culture war- an extreme polarization of hardened ideological positions on different ideas of America. Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows brings a fresh perspective to the confusing question of American identity. It clears the minefields laid by the generals commanding the opposing camps, while demonstrating that both sides have been primarily interested in protecting and defending an idea of "Americanness" that cannot resist scrutiny. Some of the leading international scholars in anthropology, comparative literature, and history of the Americas show convincingly in this book that contacts between and among peoples and ethnic groups have, since early colonial times, produced new- and typically American- cultural forms throughout the hemisphere. Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows will appeal to the general reader and will attract a wide readership in folklore and cultural anthropology as well as in Caribbean and Latin American studies, comparative literature, and history.