Discuss the significance of the trickster character as it relates to african american literature and culture

Trickster Trickster characters are unprincipled figures, animal or human playing their own role especially to outshine the heroes. They are essentialpart of the folk tradition. Being considerably week characters, they achieve their goals by tricks or indirect means. African American folk tradition has such figures. The Brer Rabbit is one such character who played a trick due to his outthinking and succeeded to liberate him to freedom.
The trickster characters also have such a role especially in the African American culture which has the background of slavery, to disclose the inequalities and the sufferings of the depressed ones. A call for freedom from the upper class or the privileged was there always for the meager and weak. Africa has a tradition of sufferings because of slavery. It was quite usual for the labors of the cotton of tobacco fields to join at every evening to tell stories as leisure. The stories have initially the characters as animals. During the twentieth century it is revealed by the researchers that the story began to focus on human activities in which the protagonist were primarily human. When the enslaved Africans were liberated, they became freer to express their experiences. Thus the oral folklores were taken the written form and the characters began to appear in their writings.
It was observed that the slaves of that time were not properly obeying their masters and there was short distance between the trickster characters in the tales and the real life of the slaves. They were the mirror figures of the animal action in those stories.
The twentieth century novels like “ The Invisible man”,” The Raisin in The Sun” etc deals with the trickster characters reacting against the white for survival. A more contemporary example of the trickster is in “ The Revenge of Hanna Kemhuff”.
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