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Woman on the Verge of a Cultural Breakdown: Zora Neale Hurston in Haiti and the Racial Privilege of Boasian Relativism

Eve Dunbar

in Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas

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 ... More

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

Conjure Queen: Zora Neale Hurston and Black Folk Culture

Catherine A. Stewart

in Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers' Project

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 ... More

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

Gender, Genre, and Ethnographic Authority:: Lydia Cabrera and Zora Neale Hurston

Lydia Cabrera and Zora Neale Hurston

in Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography

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 ... More

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

Epilogue: Modernity’s Radical Ear and the Sonic Infidelity of Zora Neale Hurston’s Recordings

Roshanak Kheshti

in Modernity'S Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music

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 ... More

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

Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain: An Anthropology of Power

James Edward Ford III

in Thinking Through Crisis: Depression-Era Black Literature, Theory, and Politics

Notebook 4 questions the impact of the dark proletariat’s activities on its own affects. It also ponders how the theological imaginary enables or represses liberatory political visions during social ... More

Notebook 4 questions the impact of the dark proletariat’s activities on its own affects. It also ponders how the theological imaginary enables or represses liberatory political visions during social breakdown. It investigate Hurston’s novel Moses, Man of the Mountain: An Anthropology of Power, its contemporary relevance during the “second Great Depression,” its place in Hurston’s intellectual-aesthetic project, and the Spinozist and Nietzschean philosophies informing Hurston’s take on several key themes regarding the multitude and messianism.Less

“The Blade Already Crying in My Flesh”: Zora Neale Hurston's Blues Narratives

Adah Cussow

in Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition

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. ... More

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

Modernism, Anthropology, Africanism and the Self: Hurston and Herskovits on/in Haiti

Claudine Raynaud

in Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde

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 ... More

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

Anthropological Visions Inside and Out: Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Mead

Shilyh Warren

in Subject to Reality: Women and Documentary Film

Chapter 2 considers the ethnographic projects of Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Mead, women who were formally trained in anthropology at Columbia University and were among the early pioneers of ... More

Chapter 2 considers the ethnographic projects of Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Mead, women who were formally trained in anthropology at Columbia University and were among the early pioneers of filmmaking as ethnographic research. Hurston and Mead shared an intense focus on the everyday experiences of women’s lives, which carried over into the broad archive of women’s documentary filmmaking that reached its apogee in the 1970s. Their work also deeply explored the differences between women whose lives were variously shaped by race, class, nation, and empire. Only rarely singled out as filmmakers, Hurston and Mead anticipated major debates and practices in documentary by turning their cameras on women whose voices exist outside the traditional viewfinder of dominant culture.Less

Whose “Folk” Are They Anyway?: Zora Neale Hurston and Lady Augusta Gregory in the Atlantic World

Kathleen M. Gough

in The American South and the Atlantic World

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 ... More

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

Literary Interventions in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Donna Aza Weir-Soley

in Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings

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 ... More

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

Decolonizing Ethnography: Zora Neale Hurston in the Caribbean

Kevin Meehan

in People Get Ready: African American and Caribbean Cultural Exchange

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 ... More

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

Ancestral Spirits

Josef Sorett

in Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics

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 ... More

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

Her Own Spook: Colorism, Vision, and the Dark Female Body

in Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness

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 ... More

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

The 1920s and 1930s Voodoo Craze: African Survivals in American Popular Culture and the Ivory Tower

Melissa L. Cooper

in Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination

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 ... More

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

Moses, Monster of the Mountain: Gendered Violence in Zora Neale Hurston’s Gothic

Erica R. Edwards

in Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership

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 ... More

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

The Monstropolous Beast: Animacy and Industry in Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West

Catherine Keyser

in Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions

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 ... More

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

Hemispheric Parallax: South America and the American South

Paul Giles

in The Global Remapping of American Literature

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 ... More

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

Autochthonomous Ambiguities: Travel, Memoir, and Transnational African Diasporic Subjects in (Post)colonial Contexts

Myriam J. A. Chancy

in Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora

This chapter concludes the study by examining exchanges between African American and Afro-Caribbean contexts, as expressed in Harlem Renaissance texts. Jacques Rancière’s concepts of engaged ... More

This chapter concludes the study by examining exchanges between African American and Afro-Caribbean contexts, as expressed in Harlem Renaissance texts. Jacques Rancière’s concepts of engaged spectatorship and subject emancipation are used to analyze intra-African Diasporic exchanges in postcolonial contexts. The chapter focuses on works by writers of the Harlem Renaissance with specific attention to their apprehension of Haitian history and folklore as an expression of autochthonomous realities. The chapter argues that what made it possible for Harlem Renaissance writers to identify with cultures and aesthetics produced by other writers and cultures of the African Diaspora was the movement’s professed search and advocacy for an African American sensibility that would birth a “New Negro” not defined by the state, or by a history of subjugation. Works by Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay show an impulse that was not one of domination, such as we see reflected in traditional travel texts, but one of af/filiation (as defined in previous chapters).Less