Black Folk Culture and the Aesthetics of Dislocation in Zora Neale Hurston

Bibliographic Data

ID23607342
AuthorsDelia Caparoso Konzett (corresponding author)
Year2002
Pages69-126
Publication date2002-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueEthnic Modernisms (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan US (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230107533_3
OpenAlexW2468736503
ISBN9780230107533
LanguageEN
References cited18

A s discussed in the previous chapter, the stories and novels of Anzia Yezierska were shown to be counternarratives to those of assimilation and Americanization. By means of her narrative strategies and use of Immigrant English, Yezierska questioned the democratic promises that acculturation held up to the new immigrants and exposed its goal of cultural unity, e pluribus unum , as that which maintained rather than opened the boundaries of the nation’s already established Anglo-American social and cultural landscape. In doing so, Yezierska attempted to rewrite the narrow social vocabulary of a standardized America and its officialese English, thereby envisioning a new and radically democratic America. Like Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston also wrote counternarratives, depicting the lives and communities of African Americans and their various reshapings of the country’s cultural and social terrain. And in similar fashion, Hurston used an idiolect to articulate the desires and goals of everyday African Americans. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Acculturation · Aesthetics · Americanization · Art · Democracy · Ethnic group · Immigration · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Names, Identity, and Discrimination Research · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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