Journal Article

Zora Neale Hurston and the Limits of the Will to Humanize

Googasian, Victoria

2021

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Subject: African American literature / Allegory / American literature / Animal behavior / Animal behaviour / Animals / Anthropocentrism / Anthropomorphism / Behavior / Biographies / Crossing the boundaries of race and culture / Exegesis & hermeneutics / Fate / Fiction / Folklore / Hegemony / Hurston, Zora Neale / Hurston, Zora Neale (1891-1960) / Interiority / Literary characters / Literary criticism / Literary devices / Logic / Museums / Natural history / Novels / Oppression / Personhood / Publishing / Publishing industry / Race / Readers / Speaking