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2. Trafficking in Trauma: Women's Rights, Civil Rights, and Sensationalism as a Spur to Social Justice
- University of Illinois Press
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2 Trafficking in Trauma Women’s Rights, Civil Rights, and Sensationalism as a Spur to Social Justice “We should be willing to go all the way. I mean that we should be willing to go live with them in their way and take it in the neck with them.” —Sherwood Anderson in urging his fellow writers to support a textile mill–workers strike during the Depression Zora Neale Hurston was a unique mixture of traumatized personality , once-poor African American woman who had migrated from the South to the North, college-trained anthropologist, and fledgling journalist and fiction writer when she got off the train in central Florida in 1927 to study the folklore of the poor black community where she had grown up. Hurston’s return to the small-town setting where she had experienced family abandonment and racial abuse played a profound role in her development as a folklorist and the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, her 1937 novel about a middle-aged black woman who after two loveless marriages embarks on a journey with a reckless but romantic man who affirms her commitment to passion in life. Hurston’s interest in voodoo and folk traditions, her mastery of dialect writing, and her determination to show the positive side of rural southern African American life already had been on display in her “Eatonville Anthology,” which was published in Messenger magazine in 1926. The stories—a mix of fiction, biography, folklore, and the anecdotes about Eatonville, Florida, that she liked to tell at parties when she was a Barnard College student in New York City studying under the famed anthropologist , Franz Boas—foretold the atmospheric, dialect-rich prose that would make Their Eyes Were Watching God a “recovered” classic when Hurston’s reputation was revived by writer Alice Walker and women critics in the early 1970s. Hurston’s folklore forays to Jamaica, Haiti, the Bahamas—as well as her repeated visits to Eatonville and surrounding areas—demonstrated her fascination with black magic and folk healing as methods of survival and cultural identity for people living in marginalized circumstances. Her odyssey was even more remarkable when one considers the traumas she endured at both ends of it: a father who gave her up to relatives for raising and experiences as a teenage maid where she was dismissed for spurning the sexual advances of her white employer; after gaining notoriety as an anthropologist and novelist, she antagonized powerful members of the black writing establishment with her criticism of writers that she felt overstated the suffering in the lives of black people, such that she ended her days broke and forgotten, living on unemployment, and writing a column about voodoo and folk culture for a small Florida newspaper.1 In a middle-class variation of Hurston’s odyssey, George Orwell decided to step out of his comfortable circumstances and purposefully experience trauma by joining the urban outcasts that lived by their wits on the streets and in menial jobs in London and Paris. Inspired by Jack London’s chronicle of urban poverty, People of the Abyss, Orwell made secret expeditions to London ’s East End in 1929, where he spent his time in the company of tramps, beggars, and unemployed laborers. Orwell wanted to learn what it was like to live among the poorest of the poor, and (like London) he disguised himself in a shabby coat, rumpled cap, and faded scarf. These expeditions provided material for his first book, Down and out in Paris and London, published in 1933, where Orwell said he hoped to “get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants.” This youthful expiation of middle-class guilt became commonplace, particularly among the journalist-literary figures who were radicalized by the suffering that came with the industrialization of the urban centers in the nineteenth century and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Orwell went so far as to endure three days without food in Paris after a thief stole all his money from his room (as he told it in Down and out in Paris and London, although he later conceded that the thief was really “a little trollop” that he had picked up in a café). Biographer Michael Shelden has noted the degree to which Orwell often turned his experiences into literary theater by pointing out that he had a favorite aunt in Paris who almost certainly would have been happy to feed him. In fact...