Theatrical Ethnography and Modernist Primitivism in Eugene O'Neill and Zora Neale Hurston
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5774087 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kurt Eisen (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 56-73 |
| Publication date | 2008-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | South Central Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0743-6831 • E-ISSN: 1549-3377 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/scr.2008.0012 |
| OpenAlex | W1982851848 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 8 |
Theatrical Ethnography and Modernist Primitivism in Eugene O'Neill and Zora Neale Hurston": The aesthetic of primitivism in the modernist era coincides with the emergence of other discourses that sought to uncover truths that lay beneath the veneer of modern culture. The science of anthropology and specifically the practice of ethnography led, in James Clifford's phrase, to an "ethnographic modernism" that would reveal "the universal in the local, the whole in the part." In American drama, Eugene O'Neill's plays typify the modernist primitive aesthetic, and like the work of such ethnographers as Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski, his plays The Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings deployed the motifs of Africanist primitivism in order to convey to their predominantly white audiences a primal reality that confirmed the "depth" of their individual psyches by figuring the primitive as a metaphorical mask of the modern self and modern culture. By contrast, the plays of Zora Neale Hurston, much better known today for her novels and ethnographic studies of the American South and Caribbean cultures, developed a vision of a "Negro art theatre" that would be based directly on her fieldwork, combining cultures and current dramatic practices into a heterogeneous, "angular" construction animated by the notion of "mimicry," which she defined as the expressive transformation of Euro-American cultural forms, language, objects, and everyday practices. Though she had been writing plays before her anthropological training with Boas at Columbia in the mid-1920s, it was "the spy-glass of Anthropology," in Hurston's phrase, that gave her a perspective on African American cultures that she would express in her plays. For Hurston, the act of mimicry is a metonymic art (in Homi Bhabha's formulation) that depends on reinvention of the contiguous and local, whereas O'Neill's idea of modern drama as "an exercise in unmasking" (to cite his own phrase from "Memoranda on Masks") depends on the notion of the mask as a metaphor of a universal condition. Examining two of Hurston's unproduced plays, Meet the Mamma and Cold Keener, along with relevant passages from her 1934 essay "Characteristics of Negro Expression" will help show how her vision of drama was changed by her ethnographic work, and how her drama exemplifies, in another of Clifford's useful phrases, "ethnographic surrealism," an inventive amalgam of scientific fact and expressive art. Above all, the dramatic power of Hurston's mimicry lay in its ability to convey not the universalized voice of the tragic individual but the collective voice of the community, insisting on its specific metonymic representation and affirming the contiguity and connectedness of both rural and urban African American life
Modernism · White (mutation · Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research · Theater, Performance, and Music History · Theatre and Performance Studies
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2018 (2) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |