Abstract
Sorensen reads the reception of Hurston with particular attention to critical challenges to her current established place in African American literary history. Rather than seeing such challenges as threats to Hurston’s standing, he argues that they are signs of a successful recovery and that even a successfully recovered author might not fully escape the constraints that limited her expression and agency in the past. Exploring Alice Walker’s essays on Hurston in tandem with critical debates in Hurston studies, Sorensen shows that recoveries fragment their objects instead of producing perfectly coherent versions of them. Sorensen also draws on critiques of historicism emerging from medieval studies to show that the problem of recovery is not exclusive to multicultural literary studies.
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Notes
- 1.
For a reception history of Hurston’s work, see M. Genevieve West, Zora Neale Hurston & American Literary Culture (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005).
- 2.
The Hurston recovery did not begin with these essays; by the time Walker published her first essay, the recovery had already been under way for more than a decade.
- 3.
All citations are from the versions reprinted in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983). “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” appears in this volume as “Looking for Zora.”
- 4.
“In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” was published in Ms. Walker delivered “Saving the Life That Is Your Own” at the MLA conference in San Francisco in 1975 and then published it in a collection of papers by the Barnard College Women’s Center in 1976. “Zora Neale Hurston” is the Foreword to Robert Hemenway’s 1977 scholarly biography of Hurston.
- 5.
Michaels argues: “For the fact that some people before you did some things that you do does not in itself make what they did part of your past. To make what they did part of your past, there must be some prior assumption of identity between you and them, and this assumption is racial…” in “Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity,” Critical Inquiry 18.4 (Summer 1992): 680. For a more recent, but largely consistent, iteration of this claim, see Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity, 40–3.
- 6.
Fabian offers the following schematics to distinguish memory work, which encompasses forgetting and remembering, from a positivist account of memory and forgetting as separate cognitive processes:
-
memory = remembering
-
vs.
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forgetting = not-remembering
-
memory
-
requiring
-
memory work
-
carried out as
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remembering and forgetting
“Forgetful Remembering,” in Memory Against Culture, 78.
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- 7.
Fabian, “Memory and Counter-Memory” in Memory Against Culture, 93.
- 8.
“Forgetful Remembering,” in Memory Against Culture, 78.
- 9.
Carby, “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology and the Folk,” in Cheryl A. Wall, ed., Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Casebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 122.
- 10.
Douglas carefully lays out the differences between Hurston’s ethnographic model and Wright’s sociological one in terms of the kinds of social spaces each tends to prioritize: rural and urban, respectively (A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism, 90–6). Henry Louis Gates provides a counterpoint to Carby in his celebration of Hurston at the expense of Wright in “Zora Neale Hurston: A Negro Way of Saying.”
- 11.
Bone, “The (Extended) South of Black Folk: Intraregional and Transnational Migrant Labor in Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God,” American Literature 79.4 (December 2007): 754. Original emphasis.
- 12.
Zora Neale Hurston, “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,” [1934], Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 868. Henceforth cited parenthetically as SNS.
- 13.
Kraut Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 35. See also Kraut’s discussion of Hurston’s use of the rhetoric of authenticity as a larger strategy emerging from a confrontation with a theatrical world shaped by “a white hegemony that Hurston sought to protest, often by making essentialist claims” (38).
- 14.
Langston Hughes voices a similar resistance to the commodification of folk forms in his “Note on Commercial Theater” [1940], The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad, ed., (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) 215–216.
- 15.
For example, see the two versions of the origins of work from Mules and Men discussed in Chap. 2.
- 16.
Hurston, Letter to Langston Hughes, March 8, 1928, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, 113.
- 17.
Hurston to Hughes, July 10 1928, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, 121–2. The original lines, from the first and third stanzas of Hughes’s “Hard Luck” read: “When hard luck overtakes you/Nothin’ for you to do./Gather up yo’ fine clothes/An’ sell ‘em to de Jew” and “If I was a mule I’d/Git a wagon to haul/I’m so low-down I/Ain’t even got a stall.” In addition to the phonetic alterations that introduce irregularities (producing what Hurston elsewhere terms angularity) into Hughes’s regular metrical form, the dealer’s alteration of the personal pronouns in the second set of verses transforms the voice of the poem from that of a knowing sufferer afflicted by the same titular hard luck as the addressee to that of a triumphant victor profiting from the addressee’s suffering. For Hughes’s original, see Fine Clothes to the Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), 18.
- 18.
Hurston, Letter to Langston Hughes, April 12, 1928, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, 116.
- 19.
One of the strongest of these formulations is Jace Weaver’s model of communatist (Weaver’s neologism fuses community with activism) Native American studies. See That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), xii–xiv and 43–5.
- 20.
Hurston discusses her first failed attempts to collect folklore in Dust Tracks on a Road [New York: Harper & Row, 1990], 143–4. Henceforth cited parenthetically as Dust Tracks.
- 21.
Choreographing the Folk, 69–79.
- 22.
Kraut suggests that Hurston also is covering up the heterogeneity of her dancers in referring to them as Bahamans. At least one member of the troupe seems to have been born in New Rochelle, New York. Ibid., 77.
- 23.
Ibid., 210.
- 24.
Wallace, “Who Owns Zora Neale Hurston? Critics Carve Up the Legend,” Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (New York: Verso, 1990), 175.
- 25.
Wall, Worrying the Line, 227.
- 26.
Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus (New York: Routledge, 2004), 4.
- 27.
Patricia Clare Ingham, “Amorous Dispossessions: Knowledge, Desire, and the Poet’s Dead Body,” The Post-Historical Middle Ages, 14.
- 28.
Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body, 146.
- 29.
Jason Frydman has analyzed the drive toward intimacy in Hurston studies in “Zora Neale Hurston, Biographical Criticism, and African Diasporic Vernacular Culture” MELUS 34.4 (Winter 2009): 99–100.
- 30.
George Edmondson, “Naked Chaucer,” The Post-Historical Middle Ages, 139.
- 31.
Ibid., 143.
- 32.
Rosalee provides a kind of historicist counterpoint to Walker’s humanist desire to reanimate the past with her desire that “she don’t answer you,” that “she’ll keep it to herself,” and that “she don’t try to tell me in person” (Walker, “Looking for Zora,” 105–6).
- 33.
Edmondson, “Naked Chaucer,” The Post-Historical Middle Ages, 148.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
The series In Search of…, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, began in 1976, the year after Walker published her essay in Ms.
- 37.
“On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” 87.
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Sorensen, L. (2016). 5 Exploding the Hurston Boom. In: Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Literary Multiculturalism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57019-2_7
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