Journal of Folklore Research

I am thrilled to be writing to you as the new editor of the Journal of Folklore Research. In July, I took over the journal from Ray Cashman, who stayed on as coeditor for a few issues, including this one. Ray has done an incredible job of cultivating JFR's longstanding international focus. I share his passion for international engagement among folklorists and scholars in related fields through the journal's offerings. I also envision JFR addressing pressing issues in folklore scholarship that are emerging from our unique social and cultural locations. Future work in JFR will look at how folklore engages with issues like race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in transnational and local contexts. This added emphasis will highlight how communities turn to folklore to deal with circumstances that are ubiquitous today (and have been in the past): disease, war, migration, environmental changes, economic disenfranchisement, and social turmoil. The practice and study of folklore is often on the "front lines" of cultural change, resistance, and creativity to a myriad of ends. I see JFR leading these conversations of folklore and ethnomusicology in context. Hopefully, in doing so, the journal will serve as an example for our sister fields also concerned with how vernacular culture and tradition produce the very circumstances that we all endure.

This issue of JFR features articles that examine how narrative and culture shape the construction of subjectivities and realities. The pieces offered ask pertinent questions about who gets to decide versions of past events, elements of tradition, and what kinds of audiences matter. Katherine Borland's "Horsing around Again: Poetics and Intention in Oral Narrative Performance," revisits some [End Page 1] of her earlier work with oral tradition and storytelling that focused on her grandmother, Beatrice Hanson (Bea). In a compelling comparison of stories told decades apart, Borland invites Bea's voice into the essay as a way for readers to consider how storytelling provides snapshots to the ongoing development of the self. Looking at linguistic parallelism, as well as discrepancies and additions to a story about a day at the racetrack, Borland unveils the importance of affect in making stories stick.

Greg Kelley's "'A Round Unvarnished Tale': The Dissolution of Narrative Authority in Othello" provides a look into the Shakespearian tragedy focused on the rhetorics of its protagonists. The piece offers a close reading of speeches made by Othello and Iago in order to examine each character's discursive modes, as well as their effectiveness in the representation of self and other in the play. Kelly suggests that the fictive nature of narrative illustrates how the creation of social realities relies on the competitive interplay between constructive and destructive forces. His look at how discourse does this work in Shakespeare suggests how folklorists can and must also investigate contemporary discourses that rely on the fictive to promote alternate realities in the public sphere and our personal lives.

Jason Baird Jackson's "On Cultural Appropriation" looks at cultural appropriation as a metacultural discourse. Rather than reifying an idea of a "core culture" that can be borrowed or stolen, Jackson prefers to look at how talk about cultural appropriation in the academy, media, and the arts reflects central concerns about cultural advocacy and the power of representation. Putting cultural appropriation alongside terms like diffusion, acculturation, assimilation, heritage, and cultural property, Jackson also gives us a deep historical and academic contextualization of the term. He invokes important debates about cultural depictions in the realm of politics, social media, and popular culture to illustrate how relationality and responsibility can serve as a means to navigate the porous yet contentious currents of cultural borrowing.

Whether it be storytelling, tragedy, or culture, the authors in this volume ask vital questions about how we make ourselves and the world through words, acts, and performance. These seem to be especially salient considerations to take into our lives now unmoored by the COVID-19 pandemic, isolation, and a deeply divisive political context based on racism. I would like to emphasize as I did at the start of this note, that the fields of folklore studies and ethnomusicology have [End Page 2] an important role to play...