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American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 265-294



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"Go there tuh know there":
Zora Neale Hurston and the Chronotope of the Folk

Leigh Anne Duck

In his 1936 Opportunity review of Mules and Men (1935), Zora Neale Hurston's collection of southern African-American folklore and hoodoo practices, Alain Locke raises a concern still prevalent in the criticism of her work. Praising her knowledge of the "rare native material and local color," he nonetheless complains that the locale, as she presents it, is "too Arcadian," even "extinct" ("Deep River" 9). An influential and prolific critic, Locke called often for the artistic representation of "folk traditions" and the "folk-spirit," which he viewed as the "deep resources of the past." 1 Hurston's work violated this dictum, however, by suggesting that the "folk" existed not only in history and in the realm of the aesthetic, but also in the present and in the social space of the southeastern US. For this reason, the critical reception of her work exemplifies the challenge of contemporary African-American vernacular theory, which, in configuring the historical rural South as a space of cultural heritage and authenticity, often struggles to negotiate its relationship to the modernizing nation (Dubey; Favor 5-9). Though she is generally celebrated as an artist whose work resisted racism by emphasizing the holistic, communal values of traditional African-American culture, she has also been widely dismissed as a writer whose representations of the "folk" accommodated the racism of a nation quick to exploit "undeveloped" peoples. Despite their divergent political and aesthetic positions, these readings tend to share the premise that the worlds inscribed in her work must be mapped outside of national modernity, and mapped, instead, in a space characterized as "mythic," "spiritual," "nostalgic," or "anti-historical" (Wall, "Mules" 667; Baker 300-05; Carby 174; Gilroy 91).

This essay seeks to intervene in this debate by considering the difficulty Hurston faced as a writer who endeavored to map [End Page 265] the relationship between national and regional African-American cultures. Though much African-American writing from the 1920s and 1930s suggests that "folk" culture offers the attraction of an authentic, racial community, that allure itself is often represented as uncanny--a dangerous nostalgia for an experience inaccessible to modern subjects and inextricably linked to racist exploitation. Mules and Men addresses this problem, to some extent, by representing the possibility of reconciling "folk" and "modern" cultural forms in individual experience. However, in suggesting the viability of the "folk" within modernity, Hurston devotes no attention to the fact that, for participants in that culture to receive political and economic justice, the region's social structure would need to change, a process that might alter its autonomous African-American communities. This tension in Hurston's treatment of the "folk" emerges in her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which suggests that segregated southern African-American communities were increasingly influenced by the values of modern bourgeois ideology. In representing this transition, Hurston provides for the preservation of folkloric values by incorporating them into the modern self-fashioning of her individuated protagonist. Through this logic, however, the novel displaces the enforced racial segregation of the South with the voluntary isolation of folkloric practice.

1. "Folk-Time" and the "New Negro"

In the foreword to his influential New Negro anthology (1925), Locke claims that the "essential forces" responsible for "social change and progress" are to be found "in the very heart of the folk-spirit"; he thus mobilizes the concept of a traditional and stable population--the "folk"--in order to suggest the depth, or "inner life," of an "emergent nationalit[y]" (xxv). Despite his interest in the "folk," however, his teleology is resolutely focused on contemporary and coming changes--the increased demand and opportunity for African-American "self-expression" and "self-determination" (xxv, xxvii). In describing this national movement, the volume, as a whole, demonstrates the temporality of a capitalist modernity in which time is understood as the dimension of progress (Osborne 70-75; Castoriadis, Imaginary 207). 2 From Locke'...

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