Doing the research for the Hare stories was really exciting because I realized that it will later on be possible to do a whole book just of African trickster Hare stories. Right now I'm working on a Brer Rabbit book, and I'll be able to follow up on that with a whole book of the African stories that are the ultimate origin for (most of) the Brer Rabbit stories. Then I'll do a book of African Anansi stories, as a follow up to the book I already did with Caribbean Anansi stories.
Hare, Spider, and Tortoise stories all came to the Americans. Spider stories are more in the Caribbean, where you'll also find Rabbit stories. The Rabbit stories gave us Brer Rabbit in the U.S., plus there are lots of great Tortoise stories too; if there's a trickster who can rival Brer Rabbit, it's Brer Terrapin.
Mantis is different: he is the trickster of the San people (a.k.a. Bushmen), and they were not brought as slaves to the Americas, so Mantis stories will be something new to all my readers I think, and there are so many great stories about him. Plus..... thanks to the fact that books from 1924 are now in the public domain, that means this book is now available online at Hathi Trust: The Mantis and his friends by W. H. I. Bleek. AMAZING. I have been wanting to read this book for a long time, but used copies are rare and expensive, so I was not able to get a copy... until now! I've pasted in the table of contents below. It looks wonderful, and I am really excited about this decision to include Mantis in my project this semester.
So, I know I've just written about my project and nothing else here in the post, but I am super-excited about it, and this coming week will be exciting too because I'll be reading project ideas from so many people in both classes.
Yay projects! Yay stories!
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