A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism

Chapter 1. Zora Neale Hurston, D’Arcy McNickle, and the Culture of Anthropology

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Zora Neale Hurston’s Anthropology Zora Neale Hurston was part of the paradigm shift from racial anthropology to cultural anthropology. In the spring of 1926, her caliper exercises in Harlem were part of the work of refuting racial thinking, for which Herskovits credits Hurston in his 1928 report The American Negro, and his 1930 study The Anthropometry of the American Negro.1 But Hurston did several important anthropology “jobs” in the years that followed. These included collecting African American folklore in rural central Florida,studying hoodoo in New Orleans and voodoo in Haiti, talking with the last ex-slave to survive the Middle Passage and collecting music from Jamaica. Hurston had arrived in New York in 1925 to take part in the Harlem Renaissance,2 but began to attend Barnard College that fall, leaving “two years later as a serious social scientist, the result of her study of anthropology under Franz Boas” (Hemenway 21). In fact, the literary output that made her famous emerged only after this anthropological training at Barnard and in the field. Hurston was an enthusiast for anthropology and for “Papa Franz,” and became “a kind of proselytizer for anthropological knowledge,” convincing Renaissance colleague Bruce Nugent to sit in on Boas’s classes for three years (Hemenway 81). What emerged from her ongoing ethnographic labor was the 1930s constellation of two novels, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were
Chapter 1 Zora Neale Hurston, D’Arcy McNickle, and the Culture of Anthropology I was glad when somebody told me, “You may go and collect Negro folklore.” —Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, 1935 (1) 22 A GENEALOGY OF LITERARY MULTICULTURALISM Watching God (1937), and two ethnographies, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), as well as the 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. In them, Hurston shaped a vision of African American Southern rural folk culture articulated through the Boasian notion of culture that she had been studying and working with for a decade and a half. By way of comparison, I crossthread my analysis of Hurston’s work with that of D’Arcy McNickle, a Salish writer and contemporary of Hurston’s whose 1936 novel The Surrounded shared with Hurston’s 1930s work a number of culturalist traits. Whereas Hurston trained as an anthropologist before turning to literature, McNickle became an anthropologist after first being a novelist. Nonetheless, what we know of the composition of McNickle’s novel reveals that he, too, turned to ethnographic sources for the details and perhaps partly for the model of culture that animates his fiction. For both Hurston and McNickle, vernacular story-telling was central to their firstphase vision of minority cultures in the United States. Both writers likewise understood African American and Salish cultures to be premised on a sense of separation from the white dominant society, and even a certain kind of sovereignty of community; the politics that emerged from both writers was an anti-assimilationist one that saw them contest the 1950s sociologically enabled assimilationist consensus signaled by Brown v. Board of Education and the federal Indian policies of Relocation and Termination. Hurston and McNickle are the best representatives of anthropology’s general influence on African American and Native American writers of the first phase. George Hutchinson and Lee Baker have recently argued that Boasian anthropology was a crucial context for,and influence on,the Harlem Renaissance writers emerging to prominence in the 1920s and continuing their work in the 1930s. “Boasian concepts”about culture and race,says Hutchinson , “became bedrock assumptions among‘New Negro’authors of virtually every persuasion” (62). John Dewey’s pragmatics was a “constellation in the intellectual field to which virtually everyone responded” (38), as was Boas’s cultural anthropology and a growing discourse of cultural pluralism as cultural nationalism. Hutchinson cites in particular Boas’s Journal of American Folklore’s sustained attention to African American folk culture as being “of critical importance for the Harlem Renaissance and that continued with historic results through the 1930s by way of the Federal Writers’ Project” (68). Lee Baker likewise suggests that the 14 issues of the journal devoted to Negro folklore between 1917 and 1937 were a critical Boasian project “appropriated by the promoters of the New Negro Movement,” an appropriation completed with Alain Locke’s The New Negro, which contained fifty references to the JAFL (Baker 158). HURSTON, MCNICKLE, AND THE CULTURE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 23 It...