Abstract
As discussed in the previous chapter, the stories and novels of Anzia Yezierska were shown to be counternarratives to those of assimilation and Americanization. By means of her narrative strategies and use of Immigrant English, Yezierska questioned the democratic promises that acculturation held up to the new immigrants and exposed its goal of cultural unity, e pluribus unum, as that which maintained rather than opened the boundaries of the nation’s already established Anglo-American social and cultural landscape. In doing so, Yezierska attempted to rewrite the narrow social vocabulary of a standardized America and its officialese English, thereby envisioning a new and radically democratic America. Like Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston also wrote counternarratives, depicting the lives and communities of African Americans and their various reshapings of the country’s cultural and social terrain. And in similar fashion, Hurston used an idiolect to articulate the desires and goals of everyday African Americans.
At certain times, I have no race, I am me.
—Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
See W E. B. DuBois, “The Talented Tenth” in W E B. DuBois: A Reader (New York: Collier Books, 1971) 31–50.
Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1940) 235.
Alice Walker, “Zora Neale Hurston—A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View,” Foreword, Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977) xi–xvii.
Hazel V. Carby, “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston” in New Essays on “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” ed. Michael Awkward (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 71–94
Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books, 1993) 74.
Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977) 307.
Hazel V. Carby, Foreword, Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991) vii–xviii.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) xxv.
Richard Wright, Review of Their Eyes Were Watching God in Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) 16–17.
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in Voices From the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nathan Irvin Huggins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 305–09.
W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: First Vintage Books, 1990) 7.
Nathan Irvin Huggins, ed., Voices from the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 3.
Alain Locke, The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1969) 3–16.
Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 73.
Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing (New York: The Feminist Press, 1979) 152–55
Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of values” points to the breakdown of the binary system of good and evil which traditionally establishes human morality. His philosophy attempted to revalue morality in terms of its ‘value for life’ (Will to Power), the extent to which it is conducive or detrimental to the preservation and enhancement of human life. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989)
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 4th edition, vol. 2, eds. Abrams, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979) 2293–300.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1993) 135.
Barbara Johnson, “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 317–38.
See Langston Hughes, “I, Too” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Fourth edition, vol. 2, eds. Baym, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994) 1718–19.
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (New York: Harper Collins, 1991) 160.
David Headon, “Beginning To See Things Really”: The Politics of Zora Neale Hurston” in Zora in Florida, eds. Steve Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel (Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991) 29.
Mitchell Duneier, Slims Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 154.
See also James McKee, Sociology and the Race Problem: The Failure of Perspective (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
Cornel West, “Nihilism in Black America” in Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books, 1993) 17–31
Richard Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears,” review of Their Eyes Were Watching God in Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) 16–17
Raymond A. Mohl, “The Pattern of Race Relations in Miami since the 1920s” in The African American Heritage of Florida, David R. Colburn and Jane L. Landers, eds (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995) 326–65.
Zora Neale Hurston, “Muttsy” in Spunk: The Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston (Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island Foundation, 1985) 19–37.
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nathan I. Huggins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 305–09
Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907) 99.
James Bordiert, Alley Life in Washington: Family Community, Religion, and the Folklife in the City, 1850–1970 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980).
Zora Neale Hurston, Color Struck in Fire!!, vol. 1, no. 1 (Nov. 1926): 7–14.
Johnson, Barbara. “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God” in Black Literature and Literary Theory. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. (New York: Methuen, 1984) 205–19
Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1990) 2–3.
Alain Locke, “The Negro: ‘New’ or Newer” in Opportunity 17 (Feb. 1939), 38.
Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (New York: Harper & Row, 1990) 57–58.
Richard Wright, “Review of Gertrude Stein’s Wars I Have Seen” quoted in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage, 1990) 338
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of ‘Culture’ (London: Routledge, 1994) 142.
Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain, introduction (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990) xxiii.
Heinrich Heine, quoted in Paul Mendes-Flohr, “The Berlin Jew as Cosmopolitan” in Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture 1890–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Zora Neale Hurston, “The ‘Pet’ Negro System” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, ed. Alice Walker (New York: The Feminist Press, 1979) 156–62.
Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
Robert Hemenway, for example, says that in Seraph, “a story of white Southerners, with only random mention of black people,” Hurston “largely turned her back on the source of her creativity.” See Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977) 307.
Darwin Turner, In A Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity (Car. bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971).
Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958).
Lillie Howard, “Seraph on the Suwanee” in Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, eds. Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) 267–79.
Hazel Carby, “Foreword” in Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991) vii–xviii.
Recently, however, feminist cridcs such as Mary Helen Washington have begun to question the popular interpretation of Janie as a prefeminist, noting problematic episodes in Their Eyes that reveal Hurston’s ambivalence towards her heroine and women in general. See Washington’s Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960 (London: Virago Press, 1989). Here, Washington returns to Robert Stepto’s earlier criticism that Janie’s power to speak is illusionary, noting disturbing moments in the text when Hurston subverts her protagonist’s voice. See Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979).
Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991) 1.
W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1935) 700.
David R. Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991).
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Roudedge, 1995) 58–59.
Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, “What is ‘White Trash? Stereotypes and Economic Conditions of Poor Whites in the United States’” in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York University Press, 1997) 168–84
Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) 20–22.
David R. Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990) 2–3.
Copyright information
© 2002 Delia Caparoso Konzett
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Konzett, D.C. (2002). Black Folk Culture and the Aesthetics of Dislocation in Zora Neale Hurston. In: Ethnic Modernisms. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107533_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107533_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38746-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10753-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)