Zora Neale Hurston 18911960

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Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
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Life and Work

• The race question" cost her career after gaining
  fame and recognition as one of the most vivid
  figures of the movement
• Died in poverty, leaving an unmarked grave in
  Florida to be rediscovered by Alice Walker in the
  late 1970s
• Fascinated by the richness of African American
  folklore and devoted many years to the collection
  and popularization of it

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Life and Work

• Born in the all-black Eatonville, Florida
• The death of her mother
• Graduated from high school
• Held various scholarships and grants, which she
  used to study at Howard, where Alain Locke taught
  for many years
• Specialized in folklore studies with the
  anthropologist Franz Boas

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Hurstons Writings

• Started writing short stories
• Invited to come to New York to write for the
  Opportunity magazine
• Contributed to the New Negro Anthology

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Hurstons Works

• In the 1930s started publishing the material
  gathered in folklore collections and travel
  writings
• Contributed to Nancy Cunards Negro An
  Anthology (1934)

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Hurstons Works

• Folklore collections Mules and Man(1935), Tell
  my Horse(1938)
• Novels
• Jonah's Gourd (1934)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
• Moses Man of the Mountain (1939)
• AutobiographyDust Tracks on a Road (1942)

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Hurstons Achievements

• The best black woman writer in America
• All her works express the communal culture of
  black southerners revealing at the same time
  their complicated world view, usually
  inaccessible for the outsiders
• Much in the vein of Alain Lockes ideas, Hurston
  believed that black culture is not what an
  outsider perceives

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Hurstons Achievements

• Ambivalence expressed in the paradoxical
  identification with her home South
• Makes herself at home in a segregated South by
  employing strategies of self-representation very
  close to our postmodern understanding of the
  fluid, heterogeneous, subaltern, unstable
  identities of today

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Hurstons Achievements

• Reminds us also that the self is linked to
  history and community
• And though the home can be an unstable community
  of others, its rich culture is the only means for
  the individuals to sustain their identities

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Their Eyes Were Watching God

• The story of Janie Crawford
• Shows that the strength of an individual lies in
  the recognition of power in language
• The ability to speak for oneself

Untitled (Harvest) by Jules André Smith
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Their Eyes Were Watching God

• Claims that oppression functions not only along
  the race lines, but along the gender line as well
• The colored woman is the mule of the world
• Janie as Zora herself, managed to affirm her own
  identity because she had the courage to speak for
  oneself

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Critical Discussions of the Novel

• No unanimous agreement about the way female and
  male voices function in the book
• Barbara Johnson in Metaphor, Metonymy and Voice
  in Their Eyes Were Watching God the emergence
  of the protagonists voice is possible only when
  she recognizes the others word in it, her own
  self-difference and double-voicedness.

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Critical Discussions of the Novel

• Mary Helen Washington I Love the Way Janie
  Crawford Left Her Husbands Emergent Female
  Hero the text reveals an actual silencing of
  Janie while privileging the male voices.

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Hurstons Contribution

• Together with Jean Toomer established a new
  narrative tradition
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr calls it a speakerly
  text
• Speakerly texts privilege the representation of
  the speaking black voice, of what the Russian
  Formalists called skaz and which Hurston called
  an oral book, a talking book

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Hurstons Contributions

• Refused to follow recipes for the represent-ation
  of black life
• Very skeptical towards the calls for racial
  solidarity of protest fiction, her credo was of
  writing a novel and not a treatise on sociology
  (in Hemenway 42)
• Attacked by her male contemporaries, most notably
  Richard Wright

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Hurstons Views on Art

• To oppose ideas of art as propaganda and art for
  arts sake is to ignore the political
  implications of any act of writing, especially
  one that insists on the sovereignty of the black
  imagination
• For all sorts of complex historical reasons, the
  very act of writing has been a political act for
  the Black author.(Gates 19905)