4 - The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston

Summary

THE work of Zora Neale Hurston, in particular the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, has been the object of more than a decade of critical attention. But, in addition to the critical consideration of Hurston's writings, her work has received the level of institutional support necessary for Hurston to enter the American literary mainstream. Two examples of this support would be the special Hurston seminar held at the Modern Language Association annual conference in 1975 and the award of two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to Robert Hemenway to write Hurston's biography. Hurston's work has also received institutional support from publishers: The rights to reprint Their Eyes Were Watching God in a paperback edition were leased to the University of Illinois Press by Harper and Row, but the 1978 Illinois edition has been so profitable that Harper and Row refused to renew leasing contracts and is reprinting Their Eyes, Jonah's Gourd Vine, Mules and Men, and Tell My Horse themselves with Henry Louis Gates as series editor. During the years between Hemenway's biography and the new Harper and Row/Gates monopoly of Hurston, there have been a variety of anthologies and collections of Hurston's essays and short stories, and in 1984, a second edition of Hurston's autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was published.

As academics we are well aware that we work within institutions that police the boundaries of cultural acceptability and define what is and what is not “literature”: Our work as teachers and as critics creates, maintains, and sometimes challenges boundaries of acceptability.