Originally in Black Camera Volume 7, no. 1, pp. 115-133. © Fall 2015, Black Camera. Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press. In March 1928, Zora Neale Hurston wrote to Langston Hughes, her friend and collaborator, to update him on her trip through the American South. Hurston was traveling under the sponsorship of Charlotte Osgood … Read more
The opening scene of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) depicts its protagonist, Janie Woods, returning to the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, at sundown and after the unfolding of the plot of the novel. According to the narrator of the free indirect discourse, the folk community sees Janie walk into town … Read more
“Women,” Jim Meserve, the white Southern turn-of-the-twentieth-century entrepreneur protagonist of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1948 white-life novel Seraph on the Suwanee, observes, “were made to hover and feel”: “it was not in their nature to do much thinking. That was what men were made for” (105). While the novel does not quite subscribe to this theory … Read more
I. In In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, Alice Walker famously characterizes Hurston as always upholding a sense of “racial health – a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings.” To be undiminished in this way requires a healthy dose of irony, a robust sense of humor, a profound commitment to endurance, … Read more
Originally the introduction to I love myself when I am laughing … and then again when I am looking mean and impressive: a Zora Neale Hurston reader. © 2020 [Copyright Holder]. Reprinted with permission of Feminist Press at the City University of New York. “She walked into my study one day by telephone appointment; carelessly, … Read more
This issue of Scholar and Feminist Online, “Undiminished Blackness: Zora Neale Hurston as Theory and Practice,” edited by Monica L. Miller and Tami Navarro, is both a celebration of the work of Zora Neale Hurston and an engagement with scholarship made possible by her innovations in theory, method, and practice. Emerging from the ZNH@125 symposium … Read more
