The Defiant Girl and the Incomplete Gentleman: A Study of Adaptations and Collections of a Ubiquitous and Mutable African Narrative

FAIN: FT-291220-23

Tobias Warner
Regents of the University of California, Davis (Davis, CA 95618-6153)

Research and writing of a book about the adaptations of the “defiant girl” folktale in Africa and the African diaspora in the modern period. 

This project explores the forms of aesthetic and political imagination that emerged around one of the most widespread yet understudied narratives in the world -- a tale of desire, deception and escape told all over pre-colonial Africa then spread across the globe by slavery and imperialism. The story tells of a defiant young woman who falls in love with a handsome stranger who turns out to be a malevolent creature in disguise who has assembled a human body for himself out of rented parts. Over the 19th and 20th centuries, this tale was transcribed hundreds of times in dozens of languages across Africa and its Atlantic and Indian Ocean diasporas. Anthropologists searched for it; dozens of creative writers adapted it. This project draws out connections between some of the many people who responded to this story. By illuminating a narrative constellation linking Africa and its diasporas, my work asks how we might broaden humanistic inquiries into the globalization of narrative.