BR’ER RABBIT (an abbreviation of Brother Rabbit, also spelled Brer Rabbit), a central folktale trickster figure and character in oral traditions passed down by African Americans, particularly enslaved people in the American South, although he is also found elsewhere, for instance, in Jamaican storytelling traditions where he bears the same name. Br’er Rabbit tales are an especially prized genre of folklore with various roots and lineages that might be traced back to Africa—to the Temne people of present-day Sierra Leone and Akan of West Africa, where the trickster character is usually embodied as the spider Anansi. Early American recordings (other than in the oral tradition) include interviews with formerly enslaved people by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, conducted in the 1930s. The trickster protagonist sometimes poses
seemingly opposing moral natures, and his tales are often complex, presenting nuanced situations in a world of entangled ethical boundaries that are articulated in stories of friendship, commitment, altruism, and community. Most Br’er Rabbit folktales describe cunning ways the weak can fight back against the strong: despite being small and vulnerable, Br’er Rabbit uses his intelligence and wits to outsmart predatory animal figures such as Br’er Fox and Br’er Wolf. The power relations that structure the lives of these historical folktale characters mirror the lives of Black people of that era and their survival within a racialized system of slavery.
Popular adaptations include those in Joel Chandler Harris’ collections that appeared in the Atlanta Constitution in the late 1870s and in published form in Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings in 1881. Harris was a White man, and his contributions to the study of American folklore are invaluable yet critically controversial, given the continued legacies of White supremacy and the plantation. The Walt Disney Company later adapted and appropriated Harris’ tales for its 1946 animated motion picture Song of the South. Leon Schlesinger Productions (later Warner Bros. Cartoons) may have also appropriated Br’er Rabbit for its anthropomorphic cartoon rabbit, Bugs Bunny. Nonetheless, these characters ultimately manifest popular yet trivialized versions of Black folktale figures such as Br’er Rabbit.