Zora Neale Hurston - a Source for Black Women's Knowledge Production

When drawing from our own literary canons as Black academics, the Misogynoir to Mishpat Research Network is sharing the following about Zora Neale Hurston. For readers who may be unfamiliar with her, the below begins with a quote from Their Eyes Were Watching God, a classic in American literature. It can be a source for womanist thought. This comes from a Public Broadcast Station (PBS) documentary. The links are also listed below.

The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2023

“So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, 'Ah hope you fall on soft ground,' because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her, so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Here's a link to the book: https://amzn.to/3Iu43kR.

And, a link to a Zora Neale Hurston reading list, including books by and about Hurston:

If you haven't read this author, you're really missing out. Her writing pulses with life, Black life. It is simply stunning.

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is, Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays. Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, in 1894. She later used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories. In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research while a student at Barnard College and Columbia University. She had an interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community's identity.

She also wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the Black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her short satires, drawing from the African-American experience and racial division, were published in anthologies such as The New Negro and Fire!! After moving back to Florida, Hurston wrote and published her literary anthology on African-American folklore in North Florida, Mules and Men, (1935), and her first three novels: "Jonah's Gourd Vine," (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God, (1937); and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Also published during this time was, "Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and "Jamaica," (1938), documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti.

Hurston's works concerned both the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades. In 1975, fifteen years after Hurston's death, interest in her work was revived after author Alice Walker published an article, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" (later retitled “Looking for Zora”), in the March issue of Ms. magazine that year. Then, in 2001, Hurston's manuscript, Every Tongue Got to Confess, a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s, was published after being discovered in the Smithsonian archives. Her nonfiction book Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo, about the life of Cudjoe Lewis (Kossola), was published in 2018.