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"Hurston, Zora Neale"
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Ain't I an anthropologist : Zora Neale Hurston beyond the literary icon
Iconic as a novelist and popular cultural figure, Zora Neale Hurston remains underappreciated as an anthropologist. Is it inevitable that Hurston's literary authority should eclipse her anthropological authority? If not, what socio-cultural and institutional values and processes shape the different ways we read her work? Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall considers the polar receptions to Hurston's two areas of achievement by examining the critical response to her work across both fields. Drawing on a wide range of readings, Freeman Marshall explores Hurston's popular appeal as iconography, her elevation into the literary canon, her concurrent marginalization in anthropology despite her significant contributions, and her place within constructions of Black feminist literary traditions.
Perceptive and original, Ain't I an Anthropologist is an overdue reassessment of Zora Neale Hurston's place in American cultural and intellectual life.
eBook
A reader's guide to Zora Neale Hurston's Their eyes were watching god
\"An introduction to Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their eyes were watching God for high school students, which includes biographical background on the author, explanations of various literary devices and techniques, and literary criticism for the novice reader\"--Provided by publisher.
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From Zora Neale to Missionary Mary: Womanist Aesthetics of Faith and Freedom
In this essay, I discuss the art of Missionary Mary Proctor, a contemporary folk artist from Tallahassee, Florida, in the context of the literary aesthetics of the renowned twentieth-century anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston. In comparing these Southern-born African American women artists, I argue that both are rooted in an aesthetic praxis deriving from their shared womanist ethics. My goal in this inquiry is to highlight the faith-based aesthetic traditions of African American women and reveal the manner in which discourses of freedom intertwine with literary and visual aesthetics and faith-based practices in African American folk art and literature. To that end, I analyze the prevalence of themes of liberation within the spiritual discourses of Southern African American women artists such as Missionary Mary Proctor and theorize the manner in which a landscape of Black female liberation is envisioned within their works.
Journal Article
Zora and Langston : a story of friendship and betrayal
\"Hurston and Hughes, two giants of the Harlem Renaissance and American literature, were best friends--until they weren't. Zora Neale Hurston ... and Langston Hughes ... were collaborators, literary gadflies, and close companions. They traveled together in Hurston's dilapidated car through the rural South collecting folklore, worked on the play Mule Bone, and wrote scores of loving letters to each other. They even had the same patron: Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy white woman who insisted on being called 'Godmother.' Paying them lavishly while trying to control their work, Mason may have been the spark for their bitter falling-out. Was the split inevitable when Hughes decided to be financially independent of their patron? Was Hurston jealous of the woman employed as their typist? Or was the rupture over the authorship of Mule Bone? Yuval Taylor answers these questions while illuminating Hurston's and Hughes's lives, work, competitiveness and ambition\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Zora Neale Hurston and the Limits of the Will to Humanize
The talking animals that populate Zora Neale Hurston's fiction and folklore collections have often been read allegorically: as stand-ins for human beings, they upend Black people's oppressed symbolic status as dumb beasts and reveal them as agential subjects capable of speaking out of turn. I argue, however, that Hurston's mules, dogs, and buzzards serve as an imaginative resource for the encounter with difference not merely through their expressive capacities, but also through their very unknowability. Hurston's animals resist becoming objects of knowledge for a natural history practice that, at the time, was increasingly dominated by mechanistic accounts of animal behavior. Her work instead stages other species as partially illegible, opaque, and uncanny, suggesting ways that species difference becomes a source of imaginative resistance for racialized subjects, a bulwark against reductive explanations that render their behavior entirely transparent.
Journal Article
The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a key text in African American literature. Its author Zora Neale Hurston has become an iconic figure for her literary works and for her invaluable contribution to documenting elements of black folk culture in the rural south and in the Caribbean. This introductory book designed for students explores Hurston's artistic achievements and her unique character: her staunch individualism, her penchant for drama, her sometimes controversial politics, her philosophical influences and her views on gender relations. Lovalerie King explores Hurston's life and analyses her major works and short stories. Historical, social, political, and cultural contexts for Hurston's life and work, including her key role in the development of the Harlem Renaissance, are set out. The book concludes with an overview of the reception of Hurston's work, both in her lifetime and up to the present, as well as suggestions for further reading.
eBook
Universes without Us
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wide variety of American writers proposed the existence of energies connecting human beings to cosmic processes. From varying points of view-scientific, philosophical, religious, and literary-they suggested that such energies would eventually result in the perfection of individual and collective bodies, assuming that assimilation into larger networks of being meant the expansion of humanity's powers and potentialities-a belief that continues to inform much posthumanist theory today.
Universes without Usexplores a lesser-known countertradition in American literature. As Matthew A. Taylor's incisive readings reveal, the heterodox cosmologies of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Charles Chesnutt, and Zora Neale Hurston reject the anthropocentric fantasy that sees the universe as a kind of reservoir of self-realization. For these authors, the world can be made neither \"other\" nor \"mirror.\" Instead, humans are enmeshed with \"alien\" processes that are both constitutive and destructive of \"us.\" By envisioning universes no longer our own, these cosmologies picture a form of interconnectedness that denies any human ability to master it.
Universes without Usdemonstrates how the questions, possibilities, and dangers raised by the posthuman appeared nearly two centuries ago. Taylor finds in these works an untimely engagement with posthumanism, particularly in their imagining of universes in which humans are only one category of heterogeneous thing in a vast array of species, objects, and forces. He shows how posthumanist theory can illuminate American literary texts and how those texts might, in turn, prompt a reassessment of posthumanist theory. By understanding the posthuman as a materialist cosmology rather than a technological innovation, Taylor extends the range of thinkers who can be included in contemporary conversations about the posthuman.
eBook