It Takes Its Shape from de Shore It Meets”
Creative Democracy and the Pragmatic Experience of Love in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11272161 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gregory S Phipps (0000-0001-9691-7371, University of Iceland, corresponding author), Gregory Phipps (University of Iceland) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 159-182 |
| Publication date | 2018-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlx078 |
| OpenAlex | W2782921771 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
This article introduces a pragmatist reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, focusing on the ways Janie brings to narrative life John Dewey’s and W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of creative democracy. For Dewey, democracy is not a system of government but a cultural way of life in which individuals participate in multiple communities, helping cultivate artistic tradition, communication, and cooperation among a diverse array of people. For DuBois, African American communities are specific repositories of creative democracy insofar as they thrive on cultural and artistic practices as well as resistance to the racist stratifications that undergird hegemonic democracy. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie personifies different elements of creative democracy, moving among various African American communities as she searches for a place where her personal ideal of love will mesh with a communal vitality founded on art, folklore, and communication. She discovers such a community in the Florida Everglades, but when Tea Cake contracts rabies, she is drawn into white hegemonic institutions. However, links between her community and the institutions equip her to introduce a pragmatic, experiential understanding of love into a courtroom context, humanizing the legal process. In this way, the novel shows how one African American woman’s creative and communal experiences of love can produce a transformative impact on hegemonic social institutions. At the same time, Janie’s necessary humanization of the white-dominated legal proceedings only emphasizes their overall failure to deliver justice for African Americans.
Aesthetics · Art · Democracy · Hegemony · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Storytelling · White (mutation) · Gender Studies · Law · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Themes in Literature Analysis
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |