Placing questions concerning the politics of culture at the center of literary and vernacular performances and of our readings of those performances, the contributors to Folklore, Literature, and Cultural

Theory attempt to extend and, in some cases, to rethink current discussions of cultural production. Focussing on the construction of community and disjunctives within community and on questions concerning identity politics and the possibility of" voice," contesting boundaries previously drawn between the traditional and the contemporary and between the oral and the written (and oralities and literacies), exploring the negotiated and mutually appropriative domains of local and larger-than-local cultural production as well as questions concerning the politics of the authentic and the touristic—the following essays seek to establish a cross-disciplinary dialogue between folklore and literature and among folklorists, literary scholars, and cultural theorists.