Ra Malika Imhotep

African Diaspora and Folklore studies have long heralded the importance of masculinized trickster figures like Brer Rabbit and Anansi the Spider, as icons of cunning resistance, but have often overlooked the ways Black feminine figures encompass the same capacity to “out smart” regimes of power. “The Tar Baby Principle” reclaims the tactics of resistance employed by real and imagined Black feminine figures in the US South. This analysis furthers the labor of the researcher’s father, Akbar Imhotep, who recast the controversial work of Joel Chandler Harris within the context of Global South folkloric traditions during his thirty-five-year tenure as “Storyteller in Residence” at the Harris’ home, The Wren’s Nest, located a mile from Spelman College. Centering the Deep South as a part of the broader African Diaspora, “The Tar Baby Principle” situates the geographies of rural and urban Georgia in a broader rhizome of Black folk intellectual and cultural production. Turning towards (and sticking to) the Black folkloric figure of the Tar Baby, this work takes seriously Zora Neale Hurston’s transhistorical truism “de nigger ‘oman is de mule of de world” and analyzes how contemporary southern Black artists personify and challenge this assertion through invocations of what the project terms, the black trickster-feminine (Hurston, 1937).