Bryan Wagner is Director of the Folklore Program as well as Professor in the English Department and Professor in the American Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has interests in legal history, vernacular tradition, urban studies, and digital humanities.
His first book, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2009), examines some of the origin myths that have been indispensable to the ethnographic documentation of African American vernacular tradition since the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries—myths about W. C. Handy, for instance, waking up to discover the blues on a train platform, or Buddy Bolden eavesdropping on the drums at Congo Square, or John and Lomax taking their phonograph recorder into the penitentiary. In recent years, these myths have come under pressure from skeptics, and yet they have remained indispensable to histories that attempt to describe the passage from Africa to America or the transition from folk to mass culture. Returning to some familiar examples (trickster tales, outlaw legends, blues lyrics) that have been essential to earlier studies of black vernacular expression, Disturbing the Peace traces an alternate line of descent for the black tradition by reading these myths against their grain. Specifically, it looks to the tradition’s ongoing engagement with the forms of law for evidence of a connection that cannot be described in the language of cultural inheritance.
His second book, The Tar Baby: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2017), interprets the global tradition of the tar baby, a folktale that exists in hundreds of versions derived over centuries on at least five continents. We know the tar baby was circulating at the same time and in many of the same places as the philosophy of property and politics developed in colonial law and political economy, and it can also be shown that the story is addressed to many of the same problems—labor and value, enclosure and settlement, crime and captivity—presented in tracts and charters associated with the so-called great transformation in world history. When the tar baby is read alongside these philosophical cognates, it looks less like a hidden transcript coding context-bound and interest-based resistance, and instead more like a universal history that seeks to grasp all at once the interlocking processes by which custom was criminalized, lands were colonized, slaves were captured, and labor was bought and sold, even as it also reflects on the experience of disenchantment and the impact of science on the conflict over resources.
His third book is a documentary edition, The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love (Louisiana State University Press, 2019). It collects and introduces the most important versions of the Bras-Coupé story from the major phase of its development between the 1830s and the 1960s. One of the most notorious outlaws in the history of New Orleans, Bras-Coupé was a leader of the maroons who lived in the cypress swamps behind the city. After his death in 1837, Bras-Coupé became a legend. It was said he had superpowers. His skin, it was believed, could not be punctured by bullets. His gaze could turn you to stone. Moreover, it was said that Bras-Coupé was an African Prince who was kidnapped and brought to Louisiana. He was the most famous performer at Congo Square, playing an indispensable role in the preservation of African music and dance. Sidney Bechet, a celebrated composer and reed player, even held in his autobiography that it was Bras-Coupé who invented jazz. This edition tracks the life and legend of Bras-Coupé as it has been recorded in newspapers, city directories, police records, treasurer’s books, public proclamations, city council minutes, memoirs, family histories, folklore collections, magazines, memoirs, tourist guides, novels, epic poems, short stories, opera, and cinema. The edition includes historical maps, facsimile documents, and a definitive bibliography.
His fourth book, The Wild Tchoupitoulas (Bloomsbury, 2019) is a contribution to the 33 ⅓ Series, focused on an album that is a classic expression of the modern New Orleans sound, drawing on carnival tradition stretching back a century in adapting songs from the Mardi Gras Indians. On the album, music performed in the streets as call and response with tambourines and makeshift percussion is transformed into sonorous electric funk that is accented by calypso and reggae. A landmark in local history, the album helped establish the terms by which processional vernacular music in New Orleans would be commercialized through the record industry and tourist trade, setting into motion an ongoing process that has raised more questions than it has answered about authenticity, autonomy, and appropriation under the conditions of a new cultural economy.
In addition, he directs two multidisciplinary projects in the digital humanities: Louisiana Slave Conspiracies, an interactive archive of trial manuscripts related to slave conspiracies organized at the Pointe Coupée Post in the Spanish territory of Louisiana in 1791 and 1795; and Tremé 1908, which tells the story of one year in the everyday life of an extraordinary neighborhood that was a crucible for civil rights activism, cultural fusion, and musical innovation.
He is currently writing a book, The People's Court: Law and Performance from Slavery to the Civil Rights Movement, that reconstructs a period-bound demotic tradition in music, folklore, popular theater, and vaudeville comedy based on the jurisprudence of the police court. Looking to writers and performers from Bert Williams to Moms Mabley, Zora Neale Hurston to Dewey Markham, we find in this tradition an alternative philosophy of law attuned to roles rather than rights, asymmetry rather than notional equality, and improvisation rather than reasoned restraint.
