Zora Neale Hurston, Biographical Criticism, and African Diasporic Vernacular Culture

In her 2003 biography of Zora Neale Hurston, Wrapped in Rainbows, Valerie Boyd refers to Hurston 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,” which helped resuscitate popular and critical interest in Hurston’s life and works. 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 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).¹ Furthermore, her expert and pioneering use of the African American vernacular, what she termed “the idiom—not the dialect—of the Negro” (Hurston, “Florida” 910), obscures the artifice of that endeavor, making it easy for readers to feel an unmediated access to the author behind the words of such novels as Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). The dazzling vernacular of her personal correspondence, which Carla Kaplan has made widely available with the 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 literary historical figure with whom her audience feels an intimacy as familiar as the vernacular with which she has been so strongly identified. 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 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 questions of African diasporic vernacular culture.

In a characteristic analysis at the intersection of biographical, ethnographic, and literary discourses, Françoise Lionnet-McCumber reads Hurston’s mapping of African diasporic culture through an invocation of Isis as Hurston’s symbolic alter-ego: “‘Isis’ is 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’” (256). With her reliance on family metaphors (“children” and “siblings”), Lionnet-McCumber suggests that Hurston’s writings keep it all in the family, so to speak, an authentic African diasporic family circumscribed by “folk material.” The allusion to Isis, though, intimates the problems with this reading: as a figure from ancient Egyptian religion, Isis belongs to a tradition claimed by European, Afrocentric, and Semitic origin stories (Colla 10–15). This historiographic overlap, which Hurston invoked throughout her career in the representations of Moses to be discussed below, reflects her project of cultural geography in a way unintended by Lionnet-McCumber and other critics who narrowly construe Hurston’s affiliation with African diasporic folk material. Renewed attention to the same biographical, ethnographic, and literary terrain upon which such a critical position relies offers a more diversified portrait of Hurston’s mapping of African diasporic culture, a mapping that relies on prolific transculturations as well as a folk or vernacular aesthetic crucially involved with textuality.

Numerous institutions enable and constrain Hurston’s multidisciplinary project of representing “the idiom—not the dialect—of the Negro,” from the backstages of Broadway to backwoods jook joints, from literary patronage and academic fellowships to the marketing departments of publishing houses. This essay traces how Hurston operates within multiple institutional, cultural, and formal processes of African diasporic cultural production in which vernacular modes of orality and textuality mutually constitute one another. This mutually constitutive relationship motors Hurston’s trajectory through professional opportunities and obstacles, and it also appears as a key theme of her work. Hurston’s private and public writings reveal how institutionally inflected crossings of orality and textuality inform a career-long mapping of African diasporic culture that exceeds the vernacular, folkish, and familiar.

Hurston’s first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), tells...