Virginia Lynn Moylan
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780813035789
- eISBN:
- 9780813046228
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813035789.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book draws on archival and community census reports, new interviews with Hurston’s contemporaries, numerous correspondence, and diligent research to fill in the missing pieces of Hurston’s life ...
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This book draws on archival and community census reports, new interviews with Hurston’s contemporaries, numerous correspondence, and diligent research to fill in the missing pieces of Hurston’s life after she returned to Florida following a false child molestation charge in 1948. Included is a summary of the highlights of Hurston’s life and career through 1948, an accounting of the molestation scandal, a fresh and judicious examination and interpretation of her controversial political views, and her involvement with the production of the country’s first anthropologically correct black baby doll. The book also provides a crucial, deft analysis of Hurston’s revisionist views on King Herod the Great and provides new details about the period she lived in Eau Gallie, Belle Glade, and Fort Pierce.Less
This book draws on archival and community census reports, new interviews with Hurston’s contemporaries, numerous correspondence, and diligent research to fill in the missing pieces of Hurston’s life after she returned to Florida following a false child molestation charge in 1948. Included is a summary of the highlights of Hurston’s life and career through 1948, an accounting of the molestation scandal, a fresh and judicious examination and interpretation of her controversial political views, and her involvement with the production of the country’s first anthropologically correct black baby doll. The book also provides a crucial, deft analysis of Hurston’s revisionist views on King Herod the Great and provides new details about the period she lived in Eau Gallie, Belle Glade, and Fort Pierce.
Eve Dunbar
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780300196511
- eISBN:
- 9780300235678
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300196511.003.0011
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Anthropology, Theory and Practice
This chapter argues that despite Zora Neale Hurston's training under Boas and her work as an intellectual arm of his theoretical and methodological machine, her marginality to American anthropology ...
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This chapter argues that despite Zora Neale Hurston's training under Boas and her work as an intellectual arm of his theoretical and methodological machine, her marginality to American anthropology was no mere accident. When recounting the history of how American anthropology positively challenged and changed foundational notions about racial difference and diversity in the United States, one must also account for the erasure of Hurston's centrality to narratives of modern anthropology's methodological innovations around diversity. Through the use of archival materials and Hurston's own scholarly production, the chapter fleshes out a story that rests squarely within the tension created by Hurston's sense of the discipline's desire to write her out. It focuses on Hurston's Caribbean ethnography, Tell My Horse, paying special attention to textual examples where she attempts to distinguish herself from laypersons treating Haiti in order to textually frame herself as a trained ethnographer.Less
This chapter argues that despite Zora Neale Hurston's training under Boas and her work as an intellectual arm of his theoretical and methodological machine, her marginality to American anthropology was no mere accident. When recounting the history of how American anthropology positively challenged and changed foundational notions about racial difference and diversity in the United States, one must also account for the erasure of Hurston's centrality to narratives of modern anthropology's methodological innovations around diversity. Through the use of archival materials and Hurston's own scholarly production, the chapter fleshes out a story that rests squarely within the tension created by Hurston's sense of the discipline's desire to write her out. It focuses on Hurston's Caribbean ethnography, Tell My Horse, paying special attention to textual examples where she attempts to distinguish herself from laypersons treating Haiti in order to textually frame herself as a trained ethnographer.
Catherine A. Stewart
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469626260
- eISBN:
- 9781469628295
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469626260.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter provides a comparative look at Zora Neale Hurston’s brief career as a trained anthropologist and her experiences with the Federal Writers’ Project as a member of Florida’s segregated ...
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This chapter provides a comparative look at Zora Neale Hurston’s brief career as a trained anthropologist and her experiences with the Federal Writers’ Project as a member of Florida’s segregated Negro Writers’ Unit. Using Hurston’s ethnography of black folk culture, Mules and Men, the chapter examines Hurston’s many roles: ethnographer, protégé of white patrons, and native informant for her white colleagues. Correspondence with Langston Hughes and Franz Boas while she was conducting field work reveals her methods for getting inside black folk communities, and how her approach to her informants and material significantly diverged from academic conventions. Hurston’s emphasis on black folk traditions and vernacular also placed her at odds with fellow employees of Florida’s Negro Writers’ Unit who wished to emphasize assimilation into the bourgeoisie. The marginalization of Hurston’s contributions exposes the fissures that developed within the African American intelligentsia over how to represent black identity and culture.Less
This chapter provides a comparative look at Zora Neale Hurston’s brief career as a trained anthropologist and her experiences with the Federal Writers’ Project as a member of Florida’s segregated Negro Writers’ Unit. Using Hurston’s ethnography of black folk culture, Mules and Men, the chapter examines Hurston’s many roles: ethnographer, protégé of white patrons, and native informant for her white colleagues. Correspondence with Langston Hughes and Franz Boas while she was conducting field work reveals her methods for getting inside black folk communities, and how her approach to her informants and material significantly diverged from academic conventions. Hurston’s emphasis on black folk traditions and vernacular also placed her at odds with fellow employees of Florida’s Negro Writers’ Unit who wished to emphasize assimilation into the bourgeoisie. The marginalization of Hurston’s contributions exposes the fissures that developed within the African American intelligentsia over how to represent black identity and culture.
Roshanak Kheshti
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479867011
- eISBN:
- 9781479861125
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479867011.003.0007
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
The concluding chapter offers an alternate and parallel history of listening to the other in modernity through an examination of recordings made of and by Zora Neale Hurston in various recording ...
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The concluding chapter offers an alternate and parallel history of listening to the other in modernity through an examination of recordings made of and by Zora Neale Hurston in various recording expeditions between 1935 and 1939. This contrapuntal Epilogue focuses on recordings that offer an alternative listening relation to the one chronicled in the other five chapters, one that is as firmly rooted within modernity but refuses the social structuration and symbolic formations mapped in the WMCI. This concluding chapter presents a different origin story of recording than the one chronicled in the book, offering the starting point for a liberationist genealogy that the book wishes for.Less
The concluding chapter offers an alternate and parallel history of listening to the other in modernity through an examination of recordings made of and by Zora Neale Hurston in various recording expeditions between 1935 and 1939. This contrapuntal Epilogue focuses on recordings that offer an alternative listening relation to the one chronicled in the other five chapters, one that is as firmly rooted within modernity but refuses the social structuration and symbolic formations mapped in the WMCI. This concluding chapter presents a different origin story of recording than the one chronicled in the book, offering the starting point for a liberationist genealogy that the book wishes for.
Lydia Cabrera and Zora Neale Hurston
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780813037479
- eISBN:
- 9780813042329
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813037479.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
This chapter interrogates the nature of ethnographic authority in Lydia Cabrera's El Monte and African American writer Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men. It shows how these two writers modify the ...
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This chapter interrogates the nature of ethnographic authority in Lydia Cabrera's El Monte and African American writer Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men. It shows how these two writers modify the construction of the ethnographic narrative voice to navigate racial and gender differences and to interweave ethnographic, autobiographical, and fictional narratives. By comparing how Cabrera and Hurston position themselves within the text, the chapter emphasizes the importance of gender in Cuban writing and the uniqueness of the Cuban situation with regard to race, even in the context of a broader, transnational experimentation with genre conventions. Hurston and Cabrera use an awareness of both the freedoms and limitations of their position as women to make their work open to more subversive readings. Their experiments with the formal elements of ethnography allow them to highlight the limits of ethnography as a discourse for negotiating otherness within the space of the nation.Less
This chapter interrogates the nature of ethnographic authority in Lydia Cabrera's El Monte and African American writer Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men. It shows how these two writers modify the construction of the ethnographic narrative voice to navigate racial and gender differences and to interweave ethnographic, autobiographical, and fictional narratives. By comparing how Cabrera and Hurston position themselves within the text, the chapter emphasizes the importance of gender in Cuban writing and the uniqueness of the Cuban situation with regard to race, even in the context of a broader, transnational experimentation with genre conventions. Hurston and Cabrera use an awareness of both the freedoms and limitations of their position as women to make their work open to more subversive readings. Their experiments with the formal elements of ethnography allow them to highlight the limits of ethnography as a discourse for negotiating otherness within the space of the nation.
Claudine Raynaud
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748646401
- eISBN:
- 9780748684410
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748646401.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter explores the work of Zora Neale Hurston, which operates not just between genres but between disciplines. It considers Hurston's double heritage: as a creative writer engaging with the ...
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This chapter explores the work of Zora Neale Hurston, which operates not just between genres but between disciplines. It considers Hurston's double heritage: as a creative writer engaging with the cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro movement, and as an ethnographer operating within codes of disciplinary practice. Caught between the academic world and that of writing and publishing, her works are creative syntheses of the dichotomous demands of literary culture and academia. Despite a refusal to assume ‘a position of narrative mastery’ in her work, Hurston's academic non-conformism achieves similar political goals to those evident in the work of her disciplinary colleagues, through innovative use of forms of indirection, the exposure of contradictions, and the use of self-irony in her writing.Less
This chapter explores the work of Zora Neale Hurston, which operates not just between genres but between disciplines. It considers Hurston's double heritage: as a creative writer engaging with the cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro movement, and as an ethnographer operating within codes of disciplinary practice. Caught between the academic world and that of writing and publishing, her works are creative syntheses of the dichotomous demands of literary culture and academia. Despite a refusal to assume ‘a position of narrative mastery’ in her work, Hurston's academic non-conformism achieves similar political goals to those evident in the work of her disciplinary colleagues, through innovative use of forms of indirection, the exposure of contradictions, and the use of self-irony in her writing.
Adah Cussow
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226310978
- eISBN:
- 9780226311005
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226311005.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter applies the theory of intimate blues violence to a fresh reading of Zora Neale Hurston and Big Sweet and Tea Cake. It also describes Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mules and Men. ...
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This chapter applies the theory of intimate blues violence to a fresh reading of Zora Neale Hurston and Big Sweet and Tea Cake. It also describes Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mules and Men. Hurston's journey into the symbolic South of Polk County is figured in Mules and Men as both a spatial and class descent. In her great blues novel, Hurston acted out a purgative revenge on the jook by killing off the loving but dangerous exemplar of its multiple violences. In Mules and Men, Hurston showed the dialectic of blues culture in its full glory, then flees as a jealous, possessive, and murderous blueswoman chases her out of the jook. In Their Eyes, she employed in a kind of cultural splitting: the jealous, possessive, and murderous side of the blues culture's dialectic is exaggerated and then rejected, ultimately, as the “mad dog” snarling through helpless Tea Cake.Less
This chapter applies the theory of intimate blues violence to a fresh reading of Zora Neale Hurston and Big Sweet and Tea Cake. It also describes Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mules and Men. Hurston's journey into the symbolic South of Polk County is figured in Mules and Men as both a spatial and class descent. In her great blues novel, Hurston acted out a purgative revenge on the jook by killing off the loving but dangerous exemplar of its multiple violences. In Mules and Men, Hurston showed the dialectic of blues culture in its full glory, then flees as a jealous, possessive, and murderous blueswoman chases her out of the jook. In Their Eyes, she employed in a kind of cultural splitting: the jealous, possessive, and murderous side of the blues culture's dialectic is exaggerated and then rejected, ultimately, as the “mad dog” snarling through helpless Tea Cake.
Kathleen M. Gough
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780813044378
- eISBN:
- 9780813046471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813044378.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
Drawing on insights from gender and performance studies, this chapter uses the careers and writings of Florida’s Zora Neale Hurston and Ireland’s Lady Augusta Gregory to examine the creation of both ...
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Drawing on insights from gender and performance studies, this chapter uses the careers and writings of Florida’s Zora Neale Hurston and Ireland’s Lady Augusta Gregory to examine the creation of both Black and Green Atlantics. By exploring their work and subsequent public reputations, it reveals how powerful notions of Irish and black, especially southern black, identity have been generated, disseminated, and redeployed around the Atlantic World, often with recourse to similar invocations of agrarianism, religiosity, and resistance (cultural and political) to oppression. The chapter also offers a pointed critique of the tendency to ignore or marginalize women in much Atlantic Studies.Less
Drawing on insights from gender and performance studies, this chapter uses the careers and writings of Florida’s Zora Neale Hurston and Ireland’s Lady Augusta Gregory to examine the creation of both Black and Green Atlantics. By exploring their work and subsequent public reputations, it reveals how powerful notions of Irish and black, especially southern black, identity have been generated, disseminated, and redeployed around the Atlantic World, often with recourse to similar invocations of agrarianism, religiosity, and resistance (cultural and political) to oppression. The chapter also offers a pointed critique of the tendency to ignore or marginalize women in much Atlantic Studies.
Kevin Meehan
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604732818
- eISBN:
- 9781604732825
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604732818.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
This chapter explores what Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938) illustrated about the culture of imperialism in the Caribbean region. Hurston attacked the ...
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This chapter explores what Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938) illustrated about the culture of imperialism in the Caribbean region. Hurston attacked the imperialist cultures in Jamaica. She commented that everybody was groomed to talk English, act English, and even look English, adding that racism and patriarchy combined in the British rule of Jamaica to the detriment of black women who were forced to look upon the standards of a society based on white beauty. In Haiti, Hurston commented on the claims of the Haitian president Sténio Vincent as the second liberator of the country, pointing out that it was the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People, the Nation, and other organizations, who made the withdrawal of the U.S. Marines from the island nation possible.Less
This chapter explores what Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938) illustrated about the culture of imperialism in the Caribbean region. Hurston attacked the imperialist cultures in Jamaica. She commented that everybody was groomed to talk English, act English, and even look English, adding that racism and patriarchy combined in the British rule of Jamaica to the detriment of black women who were forced to look upon the standards of a society based on white beauty. In Haiti, Hurston commented on the claims of the Haitian president Sténio Vincent as the second liberator of the country, pointing out that it was the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People, the Nation, and other organizations, who made the withdrawal of the U.S. Marines from the island nation possible.
Donna Aza Weir-Soley
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813033778
- eISBN:
- 9780813039008
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813033778.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This chapter examines the ways in which Zora Neale Hurston's interventions in Their Eyes Were Watching God challenged and transformed the representations of black women in literary texts, thereby ...
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This chapter examines the ways in which Zora Neale Hurston's interventions in Their Eyes Were Watching God challenged and transformed the representations of black women in literary texts, thereby laying the groundwork for her legatees to continue the work of imagining the black woman as a sexually vibrant, spiritually whole, fully autonomous, perfectly imperfect subject. Throughout the text, Hurston inscribes Janie's spirituality as a significant aspect of her personality that enables her resistance to multiple systems of repression and domination. In addition to numerous references to the Christian concept of God, Hurston evokes, through specific signs and symbols, the presence of the Haitian Voudoun goddess of love and sexuality, Erzulie, as the leitmotif that introduces and sustains the synthesis of spirituality and sexuality in the portrayal of Janie's character. It also demonstrate how Hurston's text extends Erzulie's historiography to the African–American context.Less
This chapter examines the ways in which Zora Neale Hurston's interventions in Their Eyes Were Watching God challenged and transformed the representations of black women in literary texts, thereby laying the groundwork for her legatees to continue the work of imagining the black woman as a sexually vibrant, spiritually whole, fully autonomous, perfectly imperfect subject. Throughout the text, Hurston inscribes Janie's spirituality as a significant aspect of her personality that enables her resistance to multiple systems of repression and domination. In addition to numerous references to the Christian concept of God, Hurston evokes, through specific signs and symbols, the presence of the Haitian Voudoun goddess of love and sexuality, Erzulie, as the leitmotif that introduces and sustains the synthesis of spirituality and sexuality in the portrayal of Janie's character. It also demonstrate how Hurston's text extends Erzulie's historiography to the African–American context.
Josef Sorett
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199844937
- eISBN:
- 9780190606640
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199844937.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
During the 1930s, a number of black writers plumbed the meaning of this past in the making of a black presence in modern North America. Black religious practices, as this chapter will show, remained ...
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During the 1930s, a number of black writers plumbed the meaning of this past in the making of a black presence in modern North America. Black religious practices, as this chapter will show, remained especially significant as the ongoing effort to imagine a racial aesthetic enlisted a variety of ancestral spirits. West African and Afro-Caribbean cultures, in particular, gained a more sustained and nuanced hearing. The American South also powerfully persisted in both history and memory; and this was evident even in the 1920s in the work of such writers as Jean Toomer. As signaled by Sterling Brown’s 1932 book of poems, Southern Road, these interests only increased during the 1930s. In the monumental anthology Negro, edited by British heiress Nancy Cunard, a revival service provided the occasion for a debate between a primitive African past and Marxist propaganda. In similar fashion, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright agreed that a distinctive social and cultural world could be found in the southern “black belt” region of the United States, even if they fundamentally disagreed concerning the origins and implications of this racial difference.Less
During the 1930s, a number of black writers plumbed the meaning of this past in the making of a black presence in modern North America. Black religious practices, as this chapter will show, remained especially significant as the ongoing effort to imagine a racial aesthetic enlisted a variety of ancestral spirits. West African and Afro-Caribbean cultures, in particular, gained a more sustained and nuanced hearing. The American South also powerfully persisted in both history and memory; and this was evident even in the 1920s in the work of such writers as Jean Toomer. As signaled by Sterling Brown’s 1932 book of poems, Southern Road, these interests only increased during the 1930s. In the monumental anthology Negro, edited by British heiress Nancy Cunard, a revival service provided the occasion for a debate between a primitive African past and Marxist propaganda. In similar fashion, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright agreed that a distinctive social and cultural world could be found in the southern “black belt” region of the United States, even if they fundamentally disagreed concerning the origins and implications of this racial difference.
Kevin Meehan
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604732818
- eISBN:
- 9781604732825
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604732818.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
This book offers historical and theoretical readings of Caribbean and African American interaction from the 1700s to the present. By analyzing travel narratives, histories, creative collaborations, ...
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This book offers historical and theoretical readings of Caribbean and African American interaction from the 1700s to the present. By analyzing travel narratives, histories, creative collaborations, and political exchanges, it traces the development of African American/Caribbean dialogue through the lives and works of four key individuals: historian Arthur Schomburg, writer/archivist Zora Neale Hurston, poet Jayne Cortez, and politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The book examines how these influential figures have reevaluated popular culture, revised the relationship between intellectuals and everyday people, and transformed practices ranging from librarianship and anthropology to poetry and broadcast journalism. This discourse, the book notes, is not free of contradictions, and misunderstandings arise on both sides. In addition to noting dialogues of unity, the book focuses on instances of intellectual elitism, sexism, color prejudice, imperialism, national chauvinism, and other forms of mutual disdain that continue to limit African American and Caribbean solidarity.Less
This book offers historical and theoretical readings of Caribbean and African American interaction from the 1700s to the present. By analyzing travel narratives, histories, creative collaborations, and political exchanges, it traces the development of African American/Caribbean dialogue through the lives and works of four key individuals: historian Arthur Schomburg, writer/archivist Zora Neale Hurston, poet Jayne Cortez, and politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The book examines how these influential figures have reevaluated popular culture, revised the relationship between intellectuals and everyday people, and transformed practices ranging from librarianship and anthropology to poetry and broadcast journalism. This discourse, the book notes, is not free of contradictions, and misunderstandings arise on both sides. In addition to noting dialogues of unity, the book focuses on instances of intellectual elitism, sexism, color prejudice, imperialism, national chauvinism, and other forms of mutual disdain that continue to limit African American and Caribbean solidarity.
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226253022
- eISBN:
- 9780226253053
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226253053.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter concentrates on colorism's deployment of vision to mark and decipher difference and value. It considers the two plays about colorism by black women playwrights—Dael Orlandersmith's ...
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This chapter concentrates on colorism's deployment of vision to mark and decipher difference and value. It considers the two plays about colorism by black women playwrights—Dael Orlandersmith's Yellowman and Zora Neale Hurston's Color Struck—which were part of a tradition of work by black women that covers color/gender/class distinctions among blacks. These plays revealed how visuality is interlaced with narrative in the medium of theatre. and, in addition, presented insights into the visual and psychic effect and affect of the state-sanctioned system of colorism. Hurston's play and the scholarship on Color Struck were useful for engaging Yellowman's depiction of the traumatic relationship between vision and black female corporeality due to colorism. In the world of Yellowman, it was a totalizing system where one must kill her/his kinship to escape the legacy of black-on-black terror and the visual regime that regulates relations of alienation.Less
This chapter concentrates on colorism's deployment of vision to mark and decipher difference and value. It considers the two plays about colorism by black women playwrights—Dael Orlandersmith's Yellowman and Zora Neale Hurston's Color Struck—which were part of a tradition of work by black women that covers color/gender/class distinctions among blacks. These plays revealed how visuality is interlaced with narrative in the medium of theatre. and, in addition, presented insights into the visual and psychic effect and affect of the state-sanctioned system of colorism. Hurston's play and the scholarship on Color Struck were useful for engaging Yellowman's depiction of the traumatic relationship between vision and black female corporeality due to colorism. In the world of Yellowman, it was a totalizing system where one must kill her/his kinship to escape the legacy of black-on-black terror and the visual regime that regulates relations of alienation.
Melissa L. Cooper
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781469632681
- eISBN:
- 9781469632704
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469632681.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter explores the 1920s and 1930s "voodoo craze" by examing the way that negative ideas about "Africa" and "Africans" during these years, and the prevelance of the common association between ...
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This chapter explores the 1920s and 1930s "voodoo craze" by examing the way that negative ideas about "Africa" and "Africans" during these years, and the prevelance of the common association between Africa and spiritual primitivism (superstitions, the belief in black magic, and dark rituals) became a prominent theme in assessments of Gullah folk's African connection. Using newspapers that circulated in popular migration destinations, films, plays, and travel writers' accounts to trace popular ideas about African survivals, this chapter charts a mounting obsession with southern black voodoo and superstition that reenergizes the debate over African survivals in the academe.Less
This chapter explores the 1920s and 1930s "voodoo craze" by examing the way that negative ideas about "Africa" and "Africans" during these years, and the prevelance of the common association between Africa and spiritual primitivism (superstitions, the belief in black magic, and dark rituals) became a prominent theme in assessments of Gullah folk's African connection. Using newspapers that circulated in popular migration destinations, films, plays, and travel writers' accounts to trace popular ideas about African survivals, this chapter charts a mounting obsession with southern black voodoo and superstition that reenergizes the debate over African survivals in the academe.
Erica R. Edwards
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816675456
- eISBN:
- 9781452947488
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816675456.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This chapter discusses Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Moses, Man of the Mountain as an example of African American narrative fiction which uses an arching of contestation that restages the charismatic ...
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This chapter discusses Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Moses, Man of the Mountain as an example of African American narrative fiction which uses an arching of contestation that restages the charismatic scenario. Literary restagings of the charismatic scenario place the ideals of black leadership forged over the course of the twentieth century in dialogic tension with gender critique, historical revision, and a radical reconceptualization of black politics. The novel shows how a woman’s erotic power confronts the masculinist strictures of charismatic authority by repeatedly interrupting the charismatic relationship between leader and people—even at the risk of violent reprisal. The chapter argues that the Hurston rewrites the biblical Exodus story, which Hurston defines as a generative myth of the mystical foundations of political authority in the African diasporic world. For Hurston, Moses provides the paradigmatic instance of charisma, an authority legitimated by receiving treatment of having exceptional powers or qualities.Less
This chapter discusses Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Moses, Man of the Mountain as an example of African American narrative fiction which uses an arching of contestation that restages the charismatic scenario. Literary restagings of the charismatic scenario place the ideals of black leadership forged over the course of the twentieth century in dialogic tension with gender critique, historical revision, and a radical reconceptualization of black politics. The novel shows how a woman’s erotic power confronts the masculinist strictures of charismatic authority by repeatedly interrupting the charismatic relationship between leader and people—even at the risk of violent reprisal. The chapter argues that the Hurston rewrites the biblical Exodus story, which Hurston defines as a generative myth of the mystical foundations of political authority in the African diasporic world. For Hurston, Moses provides the paradigmatic instance of charisma, an authority legitimated by receiving treatment of having exceptional powers or qualities.
Catherine Keyser
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190673123
- eISBN:
- 9780190673154
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190673123.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and The Living Is Easy (1948), Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West use the backdrop of agribusiness and fruit imports respectively to dramatize the precarity of ...
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In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and The Living Is Easy (1948), Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West use the backdrop of agribusiness and fruit imports respectively to dramatize the precarity of black bodies within global capitalism. Their novels feature black male characters who have come to believe in the opportunities the food industry extends them, only to be sorely disappointed and in some cases utterly destroyed. In this way, Hurston and West suggest the racist limits of the category of Man. At the same time that they debunk this ideal subject, Hurston and West use figurative language to connect black bodies with animals and fruit. As scholars of critical race studies have shown, animacy hierarchies, the ranking of bodies according to their relative liveness, frequently subtend pejorative forms of racialization. Instead, Hurston and West overturn these hierarchies, pursue ecological enmeshment, and celebrate black women, queerness, and corporeality.Less
In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and The Living Is Easy (1948), Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West use the backdrop of agribusiness and fruit imports respectively to dramatize the precarity of black bodies within global capitalism. Their novels feature black male characters who have come to believe in the opportunities the food industry extends them, only to be sorely disappointed and in some cases utterly destroyed. In this way, Hurston and West suggest the racist limits of the category of Man. At the same time that they debunk this ideal subject, Hurston and West use figurative language to connect black bodies with animals and fruit. As scholars of critical race studies have shown, animacy hierarchies, the ranking of bodies according to their relative liveness, frequently subtend pejorative forms of racialization. Instead, Hurston and West overturn these hierarchies, pursue ecological enmeshment, and celebrate black women, queerness, and corporeality.
Paul Giles
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691136134
- eISBN:
- 9781400836512
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691136134.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines how the contours of American literature have changed over time by focusing on the shifting geospatial dynamics associated with the American South. In particular, it juxtaposes ...
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This chapter examines how the contours of American literature have changed over time by focusing on the shifting geospatial dynamics associated with the American South. In particular, it juxtaposes South America with the American South in order to highlight the historically variable nature of their interrelationship and the complicated ways in which these domains have intersected over time. The chapter first considers how the American South was imagined in the writings of William Bartram, William Gilmore Simms, and José Martí before discussing the notions of southern “regionalism” and pseudo-geography in the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Elizabeth Bishop. It also analyzes the fiction of William Faulkner and Frederick Barthelme.Less
This chapter examines how the contours of American literature have changed over time by focusing on the shifting geospatial dynamics associated with the American South. In particular, it juxtaposes South America with the American South in order to highlight the historically variable nature of their interrelationship and the complicated ways in which these domains have intersected over time. The chapter first considers how the American South was imagined in the writings of William Bartram, William Gilmore Simms, and José Martí before discussing the notions of southern “regionalism” and pseudo-geography in the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Elizabeth Bishop. It also analyzes the fiction of William Faulkner and Frederick Barthelme.
Cotten T. Trystan
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604734072
- eISBN:
- 9781604734089
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604734072.003.0012
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Television
This chapter, which examines Harpo, Inc.’s 2005 film production of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), shows how Harpo producers deracialize the novel and mute Hurston’s ...
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This chapter, which examines Harpo, Inc.’s 2005 film production of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), shows how Harpo producers deracialize the novel and mute Hurston’s black feminist voice, thus glossing America’s social consciousness of racial, class, and gender inequalities. One effect has been the whitewashing of black feminine subjectivity via Harpo’s over-romanticization of plot and wholesale gutting of Hurston’s vision of African American women’s struggles. Another has been the loss of Hurston’s love and appreciation for rural Negro culture, including her literary ingenuity in rendering its creative innovation.Less
This chapter, which examines Harpo, Inc.’s 2005 film production of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), shows how Harpo producers deracialize the novel and mute Hurston’s black feminist voice, thus glossing America’s social consciousness of racial, class, and gender inequalities. One effect has been the whitewashing of black feminine subjectivity via Harpo’s over-romanticization of plot and wholesale gutting of Hurston’s vision of African American women’s struggles. Another has been the loss of Hurston’s love and appreciation for rural Negro culture, including her literary ingenuity in rendering its creative innovation.
Samantha Pinto
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814759486
- eISBN:
- 9780814789360
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814759486.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter examines black feminist critique of “modernity” that refuses to keep black women locked into static historical notions of tradition. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938) as well ...
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This chapter examines black feminist critique of “modernity” that refuses to keep black women locked into static historical notions of tradition. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938) as well as Erna Brodber’s Louisiana (1994), black women occupy the center of diaspora conceptions of modernity, particularly through the texts' critique of modern African American, Caribbean, and Pan-African political movements. Hurston's ethnography/memoir of her fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti explicitly draws links between US and Caribbean gender politics through the representation of spirit possession as a suspension and critique of the existing masculinist social order. Meanwhile, Brodber's novel similarly represents a Hurston-like subject possessed by diasporic black histories.Less
This chapter examines black feminist critique of “modernity” that refuses to keep black women locked into static historical notions of tradition. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938) as well as Erna Brodber’s Louisiana (1994), black women occupy the center of diaspora conceptions of modernity, particularly through the texts' critique of modern African American, Caribbean, and Pan-African political movements. Hurston's ethnography/memoir of her fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti explicitly draws links between US and Caribbean gender politics through the representation of spirit possession as a suspension and critique of the existing masculinist social order. Meanwhile, Brodber's novel similarly represents a Hurston-like subject possessed by diasporic black histories.
Herbert Robinson Marbury
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479835966
- eISBN:
- 9781479875030
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479835966.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter focuses on the New Negro Movement, particularly as the Harlem Renaissance manifests it. It studies the work of Zora Neale Hurston as emblematic of the Harlem Renaissance intellectual ...
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This chapter focuses on the New Negro Movement, particularly as the Harlem Renaissance manifests it. It studies the work of Zora Neale Hurston as emblematic of the Harlem Renaissance intellectual tradition. In 1939, Hurston published Moses, Man of the Mountain, the first novel-length treatment of the exodus story, in which she offers an important critique to many in the Black Church and a people who have accepted the religion of their enslavers, a cautionary tale about the limits of any singular mosaic hero, and message of hope about the power of the collective's religious imagination. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, Hurston is suspicious of the black community's reliance upon divine activity to resolve social ills. She focuses her pillar of fire politics on questions of African American self-reliance and human agency.Less
This chapter focuses on the New Negro Movement, particularly as the Harlem Renaissance manifests it. It studies the work of Zora Neale Hurston as emblematic of the Harlem Renaissance intellectual tradition. In 1939, Hurston published Moses, Man of the Mountain, the first novel-length treatment of the exodus story, in which she offers an important critique to many in the Black Church and a people who have accepted the religion of their enslavers, a cautionary tale about the limits of any singular mosaic hero, and message of hope about the power of the collective's religious imagination. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, Hurston is suspicious of the black community's reliance upon divine activity to resolve social ills. She focuses her pillar of fire politics on questions of African American self-reliance and human agency.
