Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature

2: World Literature in Hiding

2 World Literature in Hiding Zora Neale Hurston, Biographical Criticism, and African Diasporic Vernacular Culture Zora Neale Hurston has emerged as a figure of world literature strongly associated with her accessible mappings of African diasporic vernacular culture. Tracking the transnational continuities of black social practices and performances, her literary-anthropological cosmopolitanism has prompted Françoise Lionnet to compare her to the Egyptian goddess Isis, “the wanderer who conducts her research, establishes spatio-temporal connections among the children of the diaspora, and re-members the scattered body of folk material so that siblings can again ‘touch each other.’”1 With her reliance on family metaphors, Lionnet suggests that Hurston’s writings keep it all in the family, so to speak, an authentic African diasporic family circumscribed by “folk material.” In light of the revisions of antiquity considered in the previous chapter, however, the allusion to Isis invites an expanded field of relations: as an ancient Egyptian figure, Isis belongs to a tradition claimed by European, Afrocentric, and Semitic origin stories.2 This historiographic overlap, which Hurston strategically invokes throughout her career in representations of Moses, to be discussed below, reflects a revisionist project of global cultural geography that works counter to narrowly construing Hurston’s affiliation with black folk material. Whereas recent critical works on seminal early twentieth-century diasporic figures such as Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay have emphasized the diverse global connections of their texts and biographies, intersecting with China, India, and Russia, Hurston remains predominantly circumscribed within an Afrodiasporan context. However, renewed attention to the biographical, ethnographic, and literary terrain upon which such a critical position relies offers a more diversified portrait of Hurston’s intersectional mapping of African and diasporic culture, a mapping that relies on prolific transculturations as well as a vernacular 42 World Literature in Hiding aesthetic crucially involved with textuality. Her work, like that of Du Bois, inserts black vernacular culture into the longue durée of world literature , attuned to the traces of discursive fields and hybrid oral-literate verbal technologies inhabiting, extending, and redoubling the transcontinental networks and archives of the cosmopolitan past accumulating in the New World. This worlding of Hurston’s oeuvre runs against the dominant trends shaping and delimiting her own career and posthumous canonization . Valerie Boyd, for example, in her 2003 biography of Hurston , Wrapped in Rainbows, refers to her as “Zora” throughout the book. This gesture of familiarity, even intimacy, extends similar gestures reaching back to Alice Walker’s acts of literary-filial devotion, chronicled in her 1975 Ms. magazine piece, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” that helped resuscitate popular and critical interest in Hurston ’s life and writings. Hurston’s writings set the stage for this intimate treatment, as she commonly employs a rhetoric of familiarity with her readers, from the authorial “I” of her ethnographic Mules and Men (1935) to that of her best-selling autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).3 Furthermore, her expert and pioneering use of the African American vernacular, what she termed “the idiom—not the dialect—of the Negro,” obscures the artifice of that endeavor, making it easy for readers to feel an unmediated access to the author “behind” the words of novels such as Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).4 The dazzling vernacular of her personal correspondence, which Carla Kaplan has made widely available with the recent publication of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (2002), has intensified this feeling of unmediated access. In sum, a combination of narrative, ethnographic, epistolary, critical, and biographical discourses has produced Hurston as a world-literary figure with whom her audience feels an intimacy as familiar as the vernacular she has been so strongly identified with. However, an analysis of the numerous institutional entanglements of Hurston’s life and career reveals the degree to which the familiar, intimate , vernacular Hurston paradoxically emerges from the exemplary, racialized conditions of textual production she often struggled against as a student, theatrical producer, performer, anthropologist, essayist, letter writer, and novelist. Her posthumous reception and canonization continue to evade the range of discursive stances she aimed to achieve with regard to the worldliness of African diasporic vernacular culture, enmeshed as it is in linguistically and geographically overdetermined oral and textual genealogies. 43 World Literature in Hiding Hurston’s first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), tells the life story of an African American preacher, John Pearson, from his youth in...