literature as well; Russell Banks’s novel Continental
Drift (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), for ex-
ample, contains a Legba figure.
HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.’s The SIGNIFYING MON-
KEY: A Theory of African-American Literary Criti-
cism (1988) is the best-known work on trickster
discourse in African-American literature. In con-
trast to Gates’s careful study, many other critics
who have used anthropology to study contempo-
rary trickster literature have tended to apply infor-
mation about particular tricksters uncritically and
across cultures, with too little regard for the liter-
ature’s specific cultural contexts. Tricksters share
qualities and can be cautiously compared; how-
ever, scholars must remember that “the trickster is
not an archetypal idea, but a symbolic pattern that
... includes a wide range of individual figures” and
the trickster’s many roles within a given culture
(Pelton, 3).
Omnipotent and omnipresent, embodying ev-
erything human and everything necessary for life,
traditional tricksters mediate inclusivity within
a society. Tricksters embody “both the spiritual
past and cultural future in the guise of personal
responsibility and responses” (Spinks, 184), and
trickster mediation discloses “the underlying con-
nection between the transcendent center of reality
and the human matrix of life, the family” (Pelton,
73). In contemporary cross-cultural American eth-
nic literary trickster texts, which serve a much less
conservative social role than their older counter-
parts in oral tradition, the purposeful concomitant
breakdowns of imaginative boundaries and social
constructs remind readers of our essential inter-
relatedness, past, present, and future.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brinton, Daniel G. The Myths of the New World: A
Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the
Red Race of America. New York: Leypoldt & Holt,
1868.
Carroll, Michael P. “The Trickster as Selfish-Buf-
foon and Culture Hero.” Ethos 12, no. 2 (1984):
105–231.
Christensen, A. M. H. Afro-American Folk Lore, Told
Round Cabin Fires on the Sea Islands of South
Carolina. Boston: J. G. Cupples, 1892. New York:
Negro Universities Press, 1969.
Cosentino, Donald. “Who Is That Fellow in the
Many-Colored Cap?: Transformations of Eshu
in Old and New World Mythologies.” Journal of
American Folklore 100, no. 397 (July–September
1987): 261–275.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A The-
ory of African-American Literary Criticism. New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Hynes, William J. “Inconclusive Conclusions: Trick-
sters—Metaplayers and Revealers.” In Mythical
Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criti-
cisms, edited by William J. Hynes and William G.
Doty, 202–217. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 1993.
——— and William G. Doty. “Introducing the Fas-
cinating and Perplexing Trickster Figure.” In
Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and
Criticisms, edited by William J. Hynes and William
G. Doty, 1–12. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 1993.
Pelton, Robert D. The Trickster in West Africa: A Study
of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. Hermeneutics
Studies in the History of Religions 8. Gen. ed. Kees
W. Bolle. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1980.
Roberts, John W. From Trickster to Badman: The Black
Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.
Spinks, C. W., Jr. Semiosis, Marginal Signs and Trick-
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stoke, Hampshire, London: Macmillan, 1991.
Elizabeth McNeilTropic Death Eric Walrond (1926)
Harlem Renaissance writer ERIC WALROND was
best known for his short stories, particularly his
collection Tropic Death (1926), in which he looks
through international lenses at the black experi-
ence. His emphasis on racism, oppression, seg-
regation, economic deprivation, and inevitably
ignorance, often manifested in his underclass
characters’ blind obedience to and dependence on506 Tropic Death