Asymmetrical Possessions: Zora Neale Hurston and the Gendered Fictions of Black Modernity (original) (raw)
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The use of Hurston’s essay by the Smithsonian Institution points to the exalted status that Hurston and her essay have now achieved. Once anthropologists began to take note of Hurston’s folklore collection Mules and Men certain adjustments were made in order to absorb Hurston’s writings into the discourse of anthropology. There has never been a systematic analysis of “The Characteristics of Negro Expression.” Hurston has been said to have been elusive. She is not at all elusive. The problem is that her readers are not equipped to read her work, because they have made a set of justifiable but nevertheless mistaken assumptions about what they are dealing with. Hurston’s essay “The Characteristics of Negro Expression” is not anthropology, it is esotericism. The other texts that Hurston wrote as anthropology—Mules and Men and Tell My Horse are likewise coded, esoteric, and are completely devoid of authenticity as anthropological studies or collections of folklore.
Conjuring Pasts and Ethnographic Presents in Hurston's Modernity
Although history suggests that conjure is a practice hidden from plain view, Zora Neale Hurston's ethnographies unearthed the pervasive and varied ways Black people throughout the diaspora-and Black women especially-used conjure to create a new reality or to disrupt the existing one. In this essay, we revisit Hurston's ethnographic and folkloric study Mules and Men to consider the question: What does it mean for Black women in America to conjure in modernity? We use ethnographic examinations of two contemporary locales-one of Florida's fantasy corridors and the South Carolina lowcountry-to unearth how contemporary Black women draw from the conjure tradition Hurston documented eighty years ago. When viewed through Hurston's ethnographic history, contemporary Black women's richly layered conjure practices disrupt the widely destructive effects of modernity.
The study of black aesthetics in selected short stories of Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin
THE STUDY OF BLACK AESTHETICS IN SELECTED SHORT STORIES OF ZORA NEALE HURSTON AND JAMES BALDWIN, 2018
Every society produces a literature that carries the complexion of that society and African American society is not an exception. Realistically, its literature treats race, spirituals, folkloric tradition and domestic themes that reflects in the struggle of an Afro-American individual and family to survive in the hostility of a new environment. The purpose of undertaking this study is to show how African American literature has treated the aforementioned Black aesthetics in the selected short stories by African American writers. The theoretical framework of the research is new historicism which is simply the study of literature through which its cultural context and intellectual history is galvanized in the history of ideas and refers to itself as a form of cultural poetics. African American writers expose familial relationships, spirituals and racial issues in different ways but agree that the Afro-American families are violated as much as individual black folks (Negroes) in their continuous struggle for emancipation. The African American writers focus on racial injustice and their works reflect the struggle for freedom and equality which has longed been denied blacks.
Black Feminism's Minor Empiricism: Hurston, Combahee, and the Experience of Evidence
Catalyst: A Journal of Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience, 2015
In this article, I argue that the Zora Neale Hurston's early twentieth-century anthropological work and the Combahee River Collective's 1977 Black Feminist Statement can be read as part of a genealogy of Black feminist empiricism: a minor empiricism that rejects positivist empiricism, strategically mobilizing dominant scientific practices while also developing an onto-espistemology specific to Black English and what Combahee terms "black women's style." Their works make tactical use of positivist empirics to critique and counter legal and medico-scientific circumscription of Black women's lives, while simultaneously participating in this counter-practice of Black feminist empiricism. As both Combahee's statement and Hurston's first ethnography, Mules and Men (1935), reveal, Black feminist empiricism is grounded not in traditional scientific virtues such as transparency and objectivity, but instead in opacity and subjectivity, which make it unavailable for use for purposes of legal subjection, Andrews Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 1(1) 2 while simultaneously revealing the raced and gendered implications of a legal system dependent on positivist values.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Controversial Relation to the Harlem Renaissance
International Journal of Language and Literary Studies
This study is about the African American Harlem Renaissance star Zora Neale Hurston and her link to this movement. She was perceived negatively by some central male figures in this movement because she didn’t follow the trend of “propaganda” for “race lifting.” She was accused of presenting a very negative image of African Americans. This image matches the stereotypical white views of the black. They believed such an image must be suppressed or marginalized in favour of something more urgent that serves the black as a whole. Others found in this approach an attempt on Hurston's part to reach and make her voice heard for the white and her interests with white publishers. In fact, she was a folklorist and anthropologist dedicated to preserving the African American heritage. She transcended the “race people” for an objective and scientific representation of her people. She examines the relationship between Hurston’s text and culture as a text, her role as outsider/ insider in telli...
The Problem of Being Black in Zora Neale Hurston's Color Struck
Human physical features such as skin color usually play an important role in defining who the person is. In many societies skin color contributes to determining social status and self-worth. This problems becomes more acute in case of women whose markers of beauty like having lighter skin mean she can enjoy more privileges in terms of partner choice, work, and status than women of dark skin. The present paper aims at exploring the impact of skin color on the life of Emma who is color stricken in Zora Neale Hurston Color Struck. Rather than discussing this issue in relation to the color-based discrimination by the white-dominated society against the black in Americ, the play focuses on the pernicious effects of internalizing the color-based feelings of inferiority among the black themselves. The paper argues that obession with one's skin color is not conduisve to one's well-being. Rather than happiness and empowerment, it leads to self-marginalization and lifelong anxiety.
Particip'Action - Revue interafricaine de Littérature, Linguistique et Philosophie / Literature, Linguistics and Philosophy, 2022
Abstract: The Afro-surrealist approach to literature takes from the belief that one can use their past experiences to change the present and hence free themselves from any shackles of servitude, and in the context of this study, it is meant to offer perspectives on how black women across African and African-American cultures use their experiences of love, family and class to change the oppressive institutions in their lives and access freedom. Given these perspectives, the corpus text is discussed taking into account the importance of experiences and ties with the community, for change and progress. The existing problem relates to biased criticisms claiming that works such as So Long a Letter and Their Eyes Were Watching God produce liberated women disconnected from the traditional world. The objective of this paper is to show that the nonconformity of females in quest for freedom vis-à-vis established institutions mirrors the Afro-surrealist use of the past experiences to create liberating values intrinsically connected to the contemporary world. The ideologies of freedom sustained by Afrosurrealism and feminism are used to discuss how the female protagonists use love, family and class, initially oppressive to them, to liberate themselves and how they extend this freedom to their community. Keywords: Afro-surrealism, African woman, community values, feminism, freedom. Résumé: L’approche littéraire Afro-surréaliste part du principe que l’on peut utiliser ses expériences passées pour changer le présent et ainsi se libérer de tout carcan de servitude, et dans le contexte de la présente étude, elle vise à offrir des perspectives sur la façon dont les femmes noires à travers les cultures africaines et afro-américaines utilisent leurs expériences d’amour, de famille et de classe pour changer les institutions oppressives dans leur vie et accéder à la liberté. Vu ces perspectives, le texte du corpus est discuté en tenant compte de l’importance des expériences et des liens avec la communauté, pour le changement et le progrès. Le problème actuel est lié aux critiques biaisées selon lesquelles des œuvres telles que So Long a Letter et Their Eyes Were Watching God produisent des femmes libérées déconnectées du monde traditionnel. L’objectif de cet article est de montrer que la non-conformité des femmes en quête de liberté vis-à-vis des institutions établies reflète l’utilisation afrosurréaliste des expériences passées pour créer des valeurs libératrices intrinsèquement liées au monde contemporain. Les idéologies de la liberté de l’afro-surréalisme et le féminisme sont utilisées pour discuter de la façon dont les protagonistes féminins utilisent l’amour, la famille et la classe, qui sont, au départ, oppressifs pour eux, pour se libérer et pour étendre cette liberté à leur communauté. Mots-clés : Afro-surréalisme, femme africaine, valeurs communautaires, féminisme, liberté.