Zora Neale Hurston and Talking Between Cultures

Bibliographic Data

ID5774066
AuthorsMary Oʼconnor (corresponding author), Mary O'Connor (0009-0004-9159-2642)
Year1992
Volume22
IssueSupplement 1
Pages141-162
Publication date1992-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCanadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X
PublisherUniversity of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.3138/cras-022s-01-07
OpenAlexW1988498856
LanguageEN
References cited18

The glamour of Barnard college was still upon me .... I went about asking, in carefully accented Barnardese, 'Pardon me, but do you know any folk-tales or folk-songs?' The men and women who had whole treasuries of material just seeping through their pores looked at me and shook their heads. No, they had never heard of anything like that around there. (Hurston [1942] 1991, 128) Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and anthropologist, learned soon after her first anthropological field trip to the American south in 1927 that she would have to talk in other accents if she was ever to collect and document the rich treasuries of African-American culture.1 Her Barnardese and scientific notebooks would get her nowhere. She herself had been born in the all- black town of Eatonville, Florida, had lived in fact with people who told their tales and sang their songs in the very dialect she was now trying to document objectively, but she had been away for fifteen years learning the language of another class and another race. She studied literature at Howard University, in Washington, and then anthropology at Barnard and Columbia, in New York. Having published stories in the Howard literary magazine, Stylus, and some poetry in the Negro World, she arrived in New York in 1925 with, she claimed, $1.50 in her purse, ready to become an author (Hemenway 1977, 3).2 She made friends with both the African- American artists of the Harlem Renaissance and their white patrons, and succeeded eventually in publishing four novels, two books of folklore, one autobiography, some plays and theatre revues, and numerous newspaper articles.3 She also continued her field work, long after she had abandoned academic anthropology, collecting examples of African-American and Car- ibbean culture in Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, Haiti, Jamaica, and Honduras

Harlem Renaissance · White (mutation · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Biographical and Historical Analysis · Data Analysis and Archiving

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