Insider and Outsider, Black and American: Rethinking Zora Neale Hurston's Caribbean Ethnography

Scholars in a variety of academic fields, including anthropology, literature, and linguistics, have lauded Zora Neale Hurston's role as a radical pioneer in their respective disciplines. Anthropologist Gwendolyn Mikell, creative writer Alice Walker, literary critic and theorist Françoise Lionnet, and sociolinguist and literary critic/theorist Karla Holloway all praise the "deep structures" of Hurston's oeuvre. ¹ The amount of scholarly attention paid to Zora Neale Hurston's work has simply exploded in the last two decades, particularly after Alice Walker's publication of her odes (essays) to (on) Hurston in the late 1970s. ² Robert Hemenway's pioneering biography of Hurston has been complemented by the publication of several other biographical, bibliographical, and critical collections. ³ My essay builds on this solid foundation by investigating Hurston's approach to constructing and articulating community in her collection of African American folklore, Mules and Men (1935). It diverges significantly from previous Hurston scholarship, though, by reading Tell My Horse (1938), and Hurston's engagement with the Caribbean therein, as both a site for the working out of the problems of racial and national community as well as of anthropological methodology in Mules, and as a textual representation of difficulties with transnational engagements that the singular national frame of Mules elides. This essay intervenes in the contemporary discourse on transnationalism by emphasizing both the specific processes by which transnational engagements are enacted and the challenges implicit therein. Such transnational engagements are born of the juggling of multiple affinities, multiple ideologies, and multiple modes of defining the self and engaging the other. Transnational black studies scholarship must be attentive to this and delve into both the disparities and the similarities between black communities.

Zora Neale Hurston tells the stories of black folk in the United States and the Caribbean while toeing and transgressing the lines marking various national, racial, and intellectual borders. Hurston emerges as both the subject and the purveyor of these tales. Just as she crafts these stories for presentation to her readers and figures herself within them, so too does she "tell stories" and construct truth in her autobiographical-anthropological writings. As Arnold Rampersad points out, for example, Hurston purposefully erased ten years of her life from her public and published persona's history. ⁴ Pamela Bordelon reveals the striking fact that Hurston fabricated the story of Eatonville as her birthplace. She traces Hurston to Notasulga, Alabama, and explicitly states: "Being identified with the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, rather than with the sharecropping and tenant-farming plains of rural Alabama was more in keeping with the image of herself that she was trying to create." ⁵ It is this concern with crafting a particularly configured image that makes reading Hurston's anthropological and/or autobiographical work such a difficult yet fascinating endeavor. Hurston went to college at Howard and then worked under famed anthropologist Franz Boas at Barnard College of Columbia University. She simultaneously spun literary and anthropological careers, based on her commitment to spotlighting and revealing the uniqueness of black cultures. Undergirding her work, though, lies her struggle with the tension between her desire to represent her (black) community and to find her own voice. That struggle takes place as much in her engagements and representations of U.S. black people and cultures as it does in her engagements and representations of Caribbean black people and cultures.

In order to reveal the mechanics of this struggle, this essay considers the following questions: (1) What techniques does Hurston employ to identify grounds of African American community in Mules and Men? (2) Which grounds of community are especially important to her? (3) How must she/does she reconfigure those grounds when she engages with non-U.S. black communities? My implicit argument is that paying careful attention to Hurston's engagements with the Caribbean is as important to understanding her scholarly and writerly selves as...