Brer Rabbit

Brer Rabbit is the most well known of the anthropomorphic animals populating the stories told by the fictitious Uncle Remus, a synthetic character invented by Georgia journalist Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908), based upon several African American storytellers he knew. Harris wrote his [Page 100]first Uncle Remus stories in 1876 as a regular column for the Atlanta Constitution. These were soon syndicated and distributed throughout the United States. They proved to be so popular both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line that demand for a book-length anthology resulted in the publication in 1880 of Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, which was followed by seven additional volumes. In these best-selling story anthologies, as well as his popular newspaper columns, Harris presented oral folklore that he had collected from former slaves in Georgia that he then retold in his written version of the African American dialect prevalent in 19th-century Georgia, which linguists regard as a fairly accurate transcription of that spoken language's syntax and vocabulary.

The stories are richly textured tales that draw upon the oral folk traditions of both African and Native American sources. They include additional material reflecting the lived experience, attitudes, and values of former slaves living in the south during and after Reconstruction, for whom such stories provided a narrative means of expressing outrage, critiquing injustice, vilifying tormentors, and vicariously enjoying revenge exacted by the oppressed upon their oppressors. Folklorists have found that Harris stayed true to his source material, and they have established relationships between many of the stories he recounts and their antecedents on both sides of the Atlantic. Others are unique to the Uncle Remus corpus, and might represent local oral traditions that would have been lost had they not been recorded by Harris.

The animal stories featuring Brer Rabbit and his friends and foes are told within a broader narrative framework, written in standard American English, in which a benevolent Uncle Remus shares his time and stories with a young white boy who he befriends. Harris's depiction of this relationship, and of the plantation life in which it takes place, has been criticized for promoting a romanticized version of race relations in the post–Civil War south, in which African Americans are, like Uncle Remus, content, passive, and pacific. Others, such as film director Spike Lee, suggest that through his tales, Uncle Remus cleverly subverts, rather than upholds, white authority.