Professor Emily Zobel Marshall

A personal memoir for a collection of memoirs focused on the experience of growing up in a mixed and multi-racial family

This chapter will examine contemporary manifestations of African-rooted trickster tales, focusing primarily on the African-rooted tricksters, Anansi and Brer Rabbit. It will explore how these African diasporic trickster folktales have been adapted to contemporary culture using two key examples; the adaptation of the Neil Gaiman’s[1] novel American Gods (2001) into a popular Netflix series (2017-2021) and Beatrix Potter’s versions of the Brer Rabbit folktales, both of which have sparked controversy. It asks if the messages of resistance and survival embedded in the “original” folktales have survived and explores what these problematic adaptations tell us about the role of the African diasporic trickster in the contemporary world.

This interdisciplinary study examines the cultural and historical significance of the Jamaican Anansi folktales. Anansi the spider is the trickster folk hero West African slaves transported to the Caribbean. He symbolizes key aspects of Afro-Caribbean culture and is celebrated as a vital link with an African past. Anansi stories, in which the small spider turns the tables on his powerful enemies through cunning and trickery, are now told and published worldwide. This original book traces Anansi’s journey from West Africa to Jamaica, where he is celebrated as a national folk hero. Anansi survived a cultural metamorphosis and came to symbolize the resistance of the Jamaican people. Anansi’s Journey begins by examining Anansi’s roots in Ghana. It moves on to detail the changes Anansi underwent during the Middle Passage and his potential for inspiring tactics of resistance in a plantation context. It ends with an analysis of Anansi’s role in postcolonial Jamaica, illustrating how he is interpreted as a symbol of individualism and celebrated as an emblem of resistance. With its broad historical sweep, tracing Anansi from Ghana through to his contested position in contemporary Jamaica, this book makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate about whether the slave trade transmitted or destroyed the culture of the enslaved.

Anansi is a complex and intriguing figure who has woven a fine tapestry of tales across the New World. Born in West Africa, Anansi survived a cultural metamorphosis and became symbolic of the struggles of the black slave. Like Anansi, the slaves worked at overturning the structured hierarchy of their environment and, from their harsh experience, coded strategies of survival. However, there is little reliable information regarding the roots of this cunning trickster hero. Where exactly did Kwaku Anansi come from, and what role did he play in his country and culture of origin? Anansi's stories were told by several Akan ethnic groups, such as the Fante, but it was the Asante who enjoyed cultural and political dominance in this region. This article will show how Anansi reflected key elements of Asante thought and culture. Not only were the Anansi stories implemented as a vehicle for political discourse, but he was tightly bound to traditional Asante religious belief. Anansi was a mediator between mankind on earth and the Asante gods of sky. He was a chaotic and Iiminal force, bridging the gap between culture and nature and testing the boundaries of Asante society by reeking havoc in their highly structured world. An exploration of Anansi's role in the rich cultural history of the Asante will reveal the original content, context and significance of the stories and uncover the reasons for the survival of this captivating trickster hero in the New World.

nansi, folk hero of the West African slaves transported to Jamaica, symbolises key aspects of Afro‐Caribbean culture. He is celebrated as a vital link with an African past and his stories have been adapted world wide as tales of trickery, fun and merriment. But Anansi has a darker, more ominous side: often devious, sometimes nasty—Anansi's behaviour can be far from exemplary.

According to Carl Jung, ‘in picaresque tales, in carnivals and revels, in magic rites of healing, in man’s religious fears and exaltations, [the] phantom of the trickster haunts the mythology of all ages’.1 Indigenous trickster figures across the globe share startling similarities. They can shape-shift, transcend gender boundaries and remove their body parts, and above all, they are the breakers of taboos and social norms. However, it is vital not to overlook the unique cultural context in which particular tricksters are embedded. Transported by slaves to the Americas, African trickster figures played a fundamental role during the plantation regime; Anansi the spider became central to the Caribbean storytelling tradition and Brer Rabbit gained popularity in North America, while Eshu was adopted by the religious practices of slaves, in particular Hoodoo in North America, Santeria in Cuba and Vodun in Haiti. Storytelling on plantations in the Americas was a communal activity, providing a cathartic release from the traumas of plantation life and ensuring the continuation of African oral traditions. The trickster also demonstrated ways in which slaves could thwart the plantation system using some of the few means available to them; their cunning, intelligence and linguistic wit. In twentieth-century North America, the Brer Rabbit trickster, the hero of plantation folktales, metamorphosed once more to become central to the African American literary tradition.

In Trinidad Carnival, ‘Baby Doll’, dressed in frilly bloomers and a bonnet, screams at male onlookers to pay for the care of their baby and thrusts a white doll into their arms. This traditional Carnival masquerade has long been implemented as a form of social commentary on absentee fathers, racial mixing, and the rape of black Caribbean women by white men.

In Trinidad carnival ‘Baby Doll’, dressed in frilly bloomers and a bonnet, screams at male onlookers to pay for the care of their illegitimate baby and thrusts a white doll into their arms. This traditional carnival masquerade has long been implemented as a form of social commentary on absentee fathers, racial mixing and the rape of black Caribbean women by white men. While the Baby Doll mas has been less visible in Trinidad carnival since the 1930s, it is now being reused and reinterpreted by social activists such as Amanda McIntyre, Eintou Springer, Tracey Sankar-Charleau, Makeda Thomas and others as a way of highlighting feminist concerns, exploring queer sexualities and tackling issues such as teenage pregnancy and sexual abuse. Over in mainland America, in the New Orleans Mardi Gras, large bands of women dressed as Baby Dolls representing the role of segregated black sex workers under Jim Crow, take to the streets to proudly ‘walk raddy ’in defiance of sexual, economic and racial oppression to strengthen the bonds of sisterhood. This article will examine the complex ways in which the Baby Doll mas has reflected, resisted and challenged capitalistic sexual and racial politics. It will outline the history of the mas in New Orleans and Trinidad and explore the multiple manifestations of Baby Doll as a form of political activism in contemporary carnival culture.

This hybrid article combines memoir, poetry and cultural and literary critique to examine the multiple hostile environments faced by Black migrants to Europe in the twentieth century. Emily Zobel Marshall draws from her own family history alongside an analysis of established ‘Windrush’ literary narratives to argue that narratives of Caribbean migration are competing, complex and multifaced when framed within a wider, more transnational field. She bridges her analysis with her own poetry and demonstrates, through the work of the David Oluwale Memorial Association in Leeds, how inroads can be made into so-called hostile environments, past and present, by communities standing together.

This chapter examines the tensions between power, performance and play within the Caribbean carnival in Trinidad, whose carnival traditions have spread across the African diaspora, and Leeds in Northern England, home to the longest-running Caribbean carnival in Europe. One of the main criticisms aimed at contemporary Caribbean carnivals is that they no longer seek to challenge the power of the establishment but have become a spectacle of the body and a celebration of capitalist consumerism. This article asks if contemporary Caribbean carnival in Trinidad and Leeds are indeed all about sequins and bikinis, a vanity show that satisfies the tourist and male gaze, or if at the heart of carnival we still find a uniquely subversive performance aimed at overturning unjust, hierarchical systems of power. 

The anarchic trickster spider Anansi, whose origins can be traced back to West Africa, is predominantly found in Anglophone Caribbean folktales, while Brer Rabbit, who originates from South, Central and East Africa, is popular across the French-speaking Caribbean and USA. Brer Rabbit tales entered white American mainstream culture in the late nineteenth century through Joel Chandler Harris’s ‘Uncle Remus’ collections. Harris, whose collections are replete with nostalgia for the plantation past, explains to readers that Uncle Remus, the contented enslaved storyteller, has “nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery” (Harris 1880 xvii). In 1926, American ethnomusicologist Helen Roberts proclaimed that while Brer Rabbit had become “byword of our own nurseries”, due to their ever-increasing popularity, “there has been no Harris for Anansi” (Roberts 244). Through scrutinising representations of Anansi in late-nineteenth-century collections in Jamaica and Brer Rabbit tales collected during the same period in the American South, this essay compares the very different trajectories of the two trickster figures. It explores how variances in cultural and political context have affected interpretations of the trickster folktales and suggests that having “no Harris for Anansi” was key to the continued sense of pride and ownership felt by African decedents in the Anglophone Caribbean for their trickster folk-hero, in contrast to the problematic racial representations the American Brer Rabbit still provokes.

Emily Zobel Marshall spent her childhood in a remote village in the mountains of Snowdonia in North Wales with her Black Caribbean mother and white English father.

The period from the 1970s to the present day has produced an extraordinarily rich and diverse body of Caribbean writing that has been widely acclaimed.

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.

As a huge, Caribbean-led, culturally hybridised, inter-ethnic festival of popular artistic creativity and social critique, the Caribbean carnival deserves much more serious attention than it has so far received. The media tends to reduce carnival to glamorous female bodies, jerk chicken, soca music and outlandish costumes. We aim to demonstrate here that there are elements of Caribbean carnival that carry a radical message, support the display of bodies of every type, and present costumes that carry important social messages, often explaining historical events and commenting on injustice. The interpretation of carnival as performative and playful is incontestable, we suggest, but what is less commonly analysed is the play of power, and resistance to power, within the various performances that constitute carnival.

THIS IS NOT A FAIRY TALE: Anansi and the Web of Narrative Power Abstract This chapter will begin by exploring the origins of Anansi the trickster spider before scrutinising the classification of Anansi stories. While providing an overview of how Anansi tales were adapted to the Jamaican plantation environment, it asks if the stories should be categorised as folktales, myths or fairy tales and what the implications of these catogorisations might be. It then focuses on the cultural adaptations of the stories in a contemporary context, demonstrating the changes Anansi has undergone in his journey into twenty-first century cutting-edge Caribbean cultural forms such as dancehall. The chapter offers the reader an expert insight into the evolution of the trickster stories while making the case for their continued relevance in Jamaican society and politics today.

Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze was born in 1956 and brought up by her grandparents in rural Jamaica. She studied at the Jamaican school of drama and first visited London in 1985 to take part in the International Book Fair of Radical and Third World Books on the invitation of internationally renown dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. In the 1970s and ‘80s in London, Breeze became a pioneering poetic voice in the radical black community in a traditionally male dominated dub poetry scene. Often cited as ‘a one-woman festival,’ she has since performed her work all over the world including tours in Europe, the Caribbean, America, South East Asia and Africa. Dub poetry is performed rather than just read and is steeped in musical rhythms. In her poem ‘The Garden Path’ (2000), Breeze lays out her poetic vision: ‘I want to make words music, move beyond language into sound’. She is committed to this manifesto and effortlessly blends Jamaican patois with so-called ‘standard’ English to create innovative new poetic forms and rhythms. She is a truly hybrid artist; as comfortable on the stage delivering spoken word performances as she is singing with a reggae band or giving readings to the literary establishment. Breeze is the author of eight books, including Riddim Ravings and Other Poems (1983), On the Edge of An Island (1997) and Third World Girl: Selected Poems published in 2011 by Bloodaxe Books with a DVD of live readings. Her recordings include ‘Riddim Ravings’ (1987), ‘Tracks’ (1991) and ‘Riding on de Riddim’ (1997). She is an honorary creative writing fellow at the University of Leicester, where she also received an honorary doctorate in January 2017. In 2012, Breeze received an MBE for services to Literature. Breeze’s work has a very strong political dimension and her poetic voice has always called for change and resistance to the oppressive and corrosive forces of ignorance and prejudice. Whether it be her ‘domestic dub,’ which highlights the struggles and lived experiences of everyday women, or her call for the ‘third world’ to confront the ‘first world’ in an attempt to throw off the shackles of neo-colonialism, she is committed to bringing her message of hope and resistance to international audiences. Breeze’s poetry not only straddles the music industry and the literary establishment but also combines reflections on both inner-city life and the natural world. Breeze divides her time between urban London and rural Jamaica and her latest collection, The Verandah Poems (2016), is a celebration of both the simplicities and intricacies of country life in Jamaica; an ode to watching the world go by from her verandah. Indeed, the verandah plays a pivotal role in black communities across the Americas. Traditionally, the verandah or porch is at the center of folk-life and oral culture and a space key to the health of the community. African American author Zora Neale Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), whose work celebrates black folklore and culture in 1930s America, writes of the pivotal role the porch plays in the oral traditions and creative lives of the African American community. Similarly to Breeze’s use of Patois, Huston goes to great lengths to capture the African American vernacular in her writing and her ‘speakerly’ text emphasises the centrality of the porch in the all black town of Eatonville as a place where people can sit together, after a hard day of work, and share their stories: When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to. (Hurston, 2000, p.60) Breeze explains that in Jamaica, unlike in England, life is lived outside so people see and notice each other, pass the time of day and exchange tales. From her Jamaican verandah Breeze can observe passers-by and involve herself in the community, but it’s also a safe and private space and people must be invited to enter it. In The Verandah Poems Breeze invites the reader onto her verandah to observe the intricate lives of visitors and passers by, feel the intensity of the tropical afternoon heat, hear the stories exchanged at the end of the day, grapple with the ghosts of the past and meditate on the changes that unfurl before her in modern Jamaica. Acknowledgments The Verandah Poems England Tour was supported by funding from Arts Council England. The Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze interview and reading was hosted at Leeds Beckett University Centre by the Culture and the Arts in partnership with literary curators, programmers and producers Renaissance One (www.renaissanceone.co.uk) on Nov 10, 2016. The interview was transcribed by Danielle Hall. The author would like to thank Melanie Abrahams from Renaissance One and Danielle Hall for their support in the transcription and publication of this interview and Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze for her sharing her wisdom and for her generous answers.

The Literary London Journal, Volume 13 Number 1 (Spring 2016) Abstract: The article demonstrates how arrival in London is depicted in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954) as elusive or postponed. Using spatial theories put forward by Jacques Derrida, Michel de Certeau and the 1960s radical thinkers the Situationists, the article focuses on the concept of dérive and the threshold in both texts. It demonstrates that initially, as the English controlled the conditions of hospitality, Lamming and Selvon’s protagonists are unable to traverse spatial and cultural thresholds and embrace their citizenship in London, which leads to a profound sense of loss. Using the central concept of dérive, or drifting, as defined by Derrida and the Situationists, the article then traces the divergent trajectories of Selvon and Lamming’s protagonists, arguing that in The Lonely Londoners we see a movement away from this state of paralysis at the threshold towards limited but creative, playful and subversive movement, while in Lamming’s text the emigrants struggle to find ways of redefining the dominant order. Keywords: Caribbean Literature, Migration, London, Jacques Derrida, dérive, Michel de Certeau, The Situationists, Windrush, British Colonialism

Contribution by Dr Emily Zobel Marshall to Natural Histories on BBC Radio 4 'Spider'. Presented by Brett Westwood and produced for the BBC by Tom Bonnett.

Jenny Zobel, fille de l’écrivain martiniquais Joseph Zobel, et Emily Zobel Marshall, petite-fille de Joseph Zobel, ont découvert récemment des manuscrits inédits de leur père et grand-père. Il s’agit, d’une part, d’une collection de lettres envoyées par Joseph en 1946-1947 depuis Paris à sa femme et à son ami martiniquais Valbrun Apat, et, d’autre part, d’extraits de son journal intime des années 1940. Elles nous proposent une analyse qui répondrait à la question « Qu’apporte la lecture de ces manuscrits à l’étude des œuvres de Joseph Zobel ? »1

‘When Carnival coming […] the poor and dispossessed walk with a tall hot beauty between the garbage and dog shit, proclaiming life, exulting in the bare bones of their person and their skin’ (Lovelace, 1979, p.5) Caribbean Carnival Cultures, at home and across the African Diaspora, are central to an examination of the ways in which African Diasporic cultures have resisted cultural oppression and, in the face of slavery and colonialism, have continued to imagine greater freedoms. Drawing from a selection of conference proceedings from the May 2017 International Conference on Caribbean Carnival Culture (Leeds Beckett University, UK) we propose seven articles that are focused on the examination of the effects of carnival on the everyday lives of participants and make a claim for carnival to be interpreted as an emancipatory practice of resistance. The Caribbean Carnival Cultures conference was a ground-breaking three-day event which attracted 160 national and international participants, featured over 45 speakers in four parallel panels as well as dance, design, poetry and traditional masquerade workshops. The event received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback from participants who had travelled from across Europe, the Caribbean, Canada and the US to attend. Moving away from a Bakhtinian analysis of carnival and disrupting his dominance in the field of carnival theory, the articles in this special edition will scrutinize the effects of carnival and masquerade on the daily lived experiences of individuals and their communities, focusing on the spiritual, psychological and emotional impact of this unique cultural phenomenon. They will pay close attention to the transformative effects of carnival that are felt not only during the carnival itself – in that extraordinary moment on the road - but during the rituals of preparation, performance and play that take place throughout the year. Articles will be focused on an analysis of carnival as a site for everyday conviviality, pleasure, social cohesion and resistance to heteronormativity, as well as examining the everyday politics of carnival performance. They will debate the effects of playing mas and the preparation rituals mas entails on identity formation, jouissance, play, and the awakening of human consciousness. Furthermore, they will scrutinize the ability of traditional masquerades to resist the increasing commercialization of carnival and ask if practices that were central to Caribbean carnival culture – resistance to officialdom, linguistic innovation and the disruptive nature of play, parody and humour – are still at the heart of carnival or if the capitalistic drive to contain carnival and substitute it with the touristic ‘beads and bikini’ mas have diminished its everyday transformative power.

British Caribbean Carnival is often portrayed as a noisy, disruptive party for the Black community in Britain, which is increasingly expected to fulfil a number of additional and conflicting civic roles, including tourism, community cohesion, excellence in professional arts and entertainment; these expectations act as centripetal forces which are encircling Carnival. Meeting all of these expectations is essential for Carnivalists, in order to gain the support of the agencies which permit the event to take place. However, for the Caribbean Carnivalists themselves, Carnival and masquerade have an important role to play in their culture, identity and heritage, and Carnival is the preserved intangible cultural heritage which links these Carnivalists to their past and their future.  Part of this culture is the use of orality, which has led to the development of a British Caribbean Carnivalist oral subculture in the U.K. Orality is essential, not just as the mechanism with which this intangible cultural heritage is preserved and transmitted, but also because there are very few textual sources where this culture and methods of making Mas are found. In this thesis I explore how orality is central to the preservation and transmission of the intangible cultural heritage of British Caribbean Carnival, and and my contribution to knowledge is the challenge the dominance of Bakhtin’s theories of Carnival and the Carnivalesque Bakhtin, 1968).  The traditional masquerades of enslaved Africans have undoubtedly evolved and adapted to meet the changing environments which were encountered, and I argue that residual elements of these masquerades have lost all practical meaning, and have become instead, social semiotic signs. To illustrate this, I have used horned and devil Mas as a case study to follow this semiotic sign through its journey in early African enslavement to its appearance in British Caribbean Carnival.  My approach to this research has been greatly influenced and informed by my experiences gained from working in many roles in the culture, arts, and heritage sector, and from my work with Carnival groups. During my career, I have developed networks of people with great knowledge and expertise from across both the culture and Carnival sectors, which has given me the opportunity to recruit interviewees for this research from national museums, universities, government policy organisations and Carnivalists. I have also gained a deeper understanding of British Caribbean Carnivalists from the research process for this thesis, which I used to help to develop Carnival in a Box, a digital Carnival project in 2020 (carnivalinabox.co.uk). My field research in Grenada enabled me to witness in person, the retention of African masquerade in the traditional Mas of the island, and relate this to the my observations of its preservation and transmission into British Caribbean Carnival parades.  Over the past fifty years, the various Caribbean Carnival traditions which have migrated to the U.K. have developed into a diverse, multicultural expression of what is increasingly (and no longer exclusively) Black British culture. Its importance extends beyond the noise and excitement of Carnival day.

A series of interviews investigating the representation of Africans in the media and society. Dr. Emily Zobel Marshall talks about racism in Britain and her experiences growing up.