Reacting to the White Publishing World: Zora Neale Hurston and Negro Stereotypes

Abstract

Hurston’s article in The Negro Digest ‘What White Publishers Won’t Print’¹ (April 1950) bemoans the dearth of novels that depict Negro and other ethnic minority characters with emotions and rest content with the stereotypes of the ‘exceptional’ Negro and the ‘quaint’. Taken on its own account, it is a vindication of minority rights and argues for a true reflection of what American society was like in the 1950s. It is an appeal to fight racist ideology precisely by undoing racist and sex- ist stereotypes, such as the idea that the black American cannot love, but can only exhibit ‘the passion of sex’ (Hurston 1995, p. 953).² In this text, Hurston does not limit herself to the depiction of black life. She is indignant about the way in which Jews, as well as other ethnic minorities, such as the Chinese, are maligned by authors supported by contemporary publishers. These texts, she argues, serve to glorify the image that the white Anglo-Saxon intellectual elite have of themselves, and promote. She advocates novels in the vein of the naturalist school embodied at the time by Nobel Prize novelist Sinclair Lewis and his best-selling Main Street (1920).³ When Hurston wrote that essay, her publishing years were over, the productive decade of the 1930s a thing of the past. She was aiming at placing her new work with white publish- ers who were working with the major modernist authors of the day. Her anti-communism was just as fierce as her desire to be true to the variety and the breadth of Negro experience.