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A historian hoping to reconstruct the social world of all-black towns or the segregated black sections of other towns in the South finds only scant traces of their existence. In Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life, Tiffany Ruby Patterson uses the ethnographic and literary work of Zora Neale Hurston to augment the few official documents, newspaper accounts, and family records that pertain to these places hidden from history. Hurston's ethnographies, plays, and fiction focused on the day-to-day life in all-black social spaces as well as \"the Negro farthest down\" in labor camps. Patterson shows how Hurston's work complements the fragmented historical record, using the folklore and stories to provide a full description of these people of these towns as active human subjects, shaped by history and shaping their private world. Beyond the view and domination of whites in these spaces, black people created their own codes of social behavior, honor, and justice. In Patterson's view Hurston renders her subjects faithfully and with respect for their individuality and endurance, enabling all people to envision an otherwise inaccessible world.

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.

Sedgwick, Johnson, and Henderson encourage thinkers and writers to question definitional consensus on what exactly sexuality is or should be, and to let literary art and cultural artifacts surprise scholars into new imaginings about it. Pheoby is the novel’s only character who pauses for the length of the narrative as a listener to Janie’s tale of sexuality flowing beyond so-called respectable bounds, from the protagonist’s blossoming into sexuality under the pear tree to her first kiss with Johnny Taylor, her sexual repulsion for Logan Killicks, her steamy flirtations with the newcomer Tea Cake, and Janie’s revelations that she is a sexual outlier: “mah love didn’t work lak they love” (Their Eyes 191). Pheoby shifts Janie’s erotic metaphor of speech into one of quietness: “[i]f you so desire,” bringing the subject of eros from speaking to an inner, nearly silent drive: “desire” (6). [...]Pheoby’s “if” invites Janie’s description of desire to remain open-ended if she so chooses. Hurston’s novel shows that a vibrant thread of sexual reimagining was also occurring among Black women who made their homes in rural communities. 3 Pheoby’s “if you so desire” places her within this geographically broad community of Black women and demonstrates the power of queer listening to imagine and create a world beyond the one dictated by the racist heteropatriarchy.

[...]Some of Us Are Brave was consciously constructed as a classroom tool. In the decades since, literary critics have characterized this moment as dominated by the search for \"lost\" works and the celebration of recently published writing by Black women.3 The creators of reading lists, syllabi, new editions of out-of-print books, and anthologies were consciously engaged in constructing a Black feminist literary genealogy in which they were the youngest generation. [...]at the moment But Some of Us Are Brave was published, the \"felt life\" of Black feminism was very different. Because so little ground had been cleared on which to build Black feminism, each new venue was regarded as something to be celebrated. [...]rather than an \"ugly feeling\" or negative affect, the archaeological impulse is characterized primarily by positive feelings -joy, satisfaction, comfort.6 I have chosen the term archaeological impulse because it captures the excitement of this moment, the possibility of unearthing something precious and incredible that had been lost for generations.

Frida Kahlo The Past and the Prelude In his introduction to the classic novel Invisible Man (1952), ambiguous black and literary icon Ralph Ellison says the process of creation was \"far more disjointed than [it] sounds . . . such was the inner-outer subjectiveobjective process, pied rind and surreal heart.\" Ellison's allusion is to his book's most perplexing character, Rinehart the Runner, a dandy, pimp, numbers runner, drug dealer, prophet, and preacher. In an introduction to prophet Henry Dumas' 1974 book Ark of Bones and Other Stories, Amiri Baraka puts forth a term for what he describes as Dumas' \"skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one . . . the Black aesthetic in its actual contemporary and lived life.\" Afrosurrealism in Action San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the African Diaspora present the works of Mutu, William Pope L., Trenton Doyle Hancock, Glenn Ligon, Wiley, Shonibare, and Walker en masse, with Lam's Jungle as a centerpiece.

For African American writers, principally Richard Wright but also James Weldon Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston, to a lesser extent, the door of literary naturalism never fully closed, especially given that the Jim Crow era and the Great Depression worsened living conditions and experiences for many African Americans after a brief period of progress following the abolition of slavery. [...]just as naturalist writer and literary theorist Frank Norris argued that characters in naturalist works \"must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful round of every-day life, and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood, and in certain death\" (1107), Romance and Amiable present harrowing, race-based situations for women. Offering a fuller summation of Dunbar's achievement, Thomas L. Morgan writes that his \"white determinism differs from the determinism of white naturalism: while whites believe that Black cultural and racial difference is based on biological difference, that difference is a product of the systemic discrepancies that exist between Blacks and whites, including but not limited to white agency and autonomy, entrenched white political power, and white economic control\" (\"Black Naturalism\" 8). At times coy, avoidant, or silent in efforts to maintain control of their intimate affairs, and by extension the directions of their lives, Aslima and Seraphine reflect the difficulties of maintaining independence in situations that amount to quicksand for women.

Starting from Hirsch and Smith's concept of a feminist counterhistory and referencing the theoretical framework of cultural trauma, this paper undertakes a (re)reading of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as construction of gendered countermemory. Such an interpretation would enable a recognition of the political function of the novel as an identity matrix of African-American womanhood. Expanding upon the classical, post-Lacanian approach to trauma studies and its post-colonial reconfigurations, I use a poststructuralist framing of collective trauma, and the Saussurian concept of signification, to highlight the struggle for self-determination of an oppressed community as it is signified-upon by its oppressors through violently imposed discourse. I further question the complicity between conventional forms of narration and the hegemony of an external signifier, and I trace this patterned mechanism of aggression within the linguistic and diegetic fabric of the novel, in order to expose Hurston's literary methodology of collective memorialization and the way it challenges canonical representations of trauma.