Creolization, Folklore, and Post-Racial Exception: Arthur Huff Fauset in Canada

Published as the twenty-fourth volume of the Memoirs of the American Folklore Society in 1931, Arthur Huff Fauset’s Folklore from Nova Scotia is the only book-length collection of Black Canadian folklore published in the twentieth century. As one of several significant American studies of Canadian folklore, the collection also illustrates the extent to which Canadian and US folklore studies were co-implicated in the construction of their respective subjects: the folk they reputedly discovered and the national cultures that folklore was thought to express. This article situates Fauset’s collection within the disciplinary and cultural contexts that shaped his account of Black Canada before examining representative stories. Drawing on recent theorizations of Canada as a space of cultural creolization, the author argues that the collection unsettles not only the persistent myth of Canada as a “post-racial” society but also the disciplinary biases that continue to structure national-cultural narratives in the present.