Annotated Bibliography for Their Eyes Were Watching God

Dan Platt 5/27/10

Eng 670

Annotated Bibliography for “Their Eyes Were Watching God

and the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928”

1. Carby, Hazel V. “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology and the Folk.” New Essays on

Their Eyes Were Watching God. Ed. Michael Awkward.Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Carby argues that Hurston’s novel uses the discourse of ethnography to create a romanticized representation of rural black folk culture that “displaces the antagonistic relations of cultural transformation” (79). Carby notes that Hurston felt the city life of African Americans to be unsuitable for study (80), and that TEWWG largely ignores the massive northern migration of southern blacks during the 20s and 30s. Carby suggests that teaching Hurston’s novel at a time of crisis in the black urban community perpetuates the displacement of cultural transformation and political conflict by offering reassurance that “black folk are happy and healthy” (89-90). Although Carby’s essay is now twenty years old, it remains a reference point for scholarly work on the discourse of ethnography in Their Eyes Were Watching God. I think she raises important questions about the novel’s politics and the role that ethnography plays in Hurston’s engagement with the social problems of her era. Although I partly agree with Carby’s assessment of Hurston’s representation of rural folk culture in the muck, my essay will argue that the hurricane complicates Hurston’s romanticized ethnography.

2. Clifford, James.“On Ethnographic Surrealism.” The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-

Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988. 117-151.

In this chapter, James Clifford suggests that the development of an ethnographic sensibility influenced the work of avant-garde artists in France between World Wars I and II. Clifford defines surrealism as an aesthetic that “values fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions” (118), and he argues that both surrealism and ethnography were dependent on the modern possibility of considering (non-white/non-Western) others as “serious human alternatives” (120). Later, Clifford discusses the inverse flow of influence, from surrealist art to ethnographic practice, which he calls “surrealist ethnography” (146-147). He defines surrealist ethnography as “the theory and practice of juxtaposition” and “the invention and interruption of meaningful wholes in works of cultural import-export” (147). Clifford’s notion of surrealist ethnography seems to offer a response to post-modern criticisms of the discipline, which question the idea of representing cultures holistically and challenge the possibility of ethnographic objectivity. I think that Clifford’s concept of “surrealist ethnography” offers a useful theoretical lens for approaching TEWWG. I think that one aspect of my argument will be that the hurricane marks a shift in ethnographic perspective in the text, from a modern, holistic representation of black folk culture on the muck to a post-modern, surrealist representation of the violent juxtaposition of cultures during the hurricane and in its aftermath.

3. Cotera, María Eugenia. “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world: Storytelling and the

Black Feminist Tradition.” Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. 171-198.

Cotera argues that TEWWG’s narrative voice is consistent with Hurston’s experiments with personal narrative as a form of ethnographic testimony. This practice departed from the disciplinary conventions of modern ethnographers, who were ambivalent about life history as a legitimate object of ethnographic study (175). And while both black and white critics of Hurston’s era regarded the novel as a “universal love story,” Cotera reads the novel as an ethnographic representation of the particularities of black experience as they shape cultural institutions such as marriage (185). Cotera reads the hurricane as “narrative retribution,” a way for Hurston to punish Tea Cake for his mistreatment of Janie (195). Although I think this is an unsatisfying interpretation of the disaster, I think that Cotera’s case for reading the novel as Janie’s ethnographic testimony (instead of simply reading its folk elements as the incursion of Hurston’s own “objective” ethnographer’s voice) is a useful point of reference, and a valuable counterpoint to Emily Dalgarno’s reading of ethnography in the text.

4. Dalgarno, Emily. "Words Walking without Masters": Ethnography and the Creative

Process in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” American Literature. V. 64, No. 3. 519-541.

In this essay, Emily Dalgarno looks at the manuscript of Their Eyes Were Watching God and several late revisions that Hurston made, including the late addition of some of the novel’s folk elements. Dalgarno claims that the shifting narrative voice that resulted from these revisions represents Hurston’s own divided consciousness, particularly her conflicting allegiances to the politics of the Harlem Renaissance and to ethnography and the representation of black folk culture (522). In reading the hurricane, Dalgarno argues that, in the original manuscript, the narrator’s perspective on the hurricane is secular and subtly critical of Christian ideology that gives the laborers on the muck a false sense of safety (526). However, with the addition of folkloric elements in revision, Dalgarno argues that Hurston undercuts the criticism and makes the disaster seem “natural” (525-526). Dalgarno’s argument that the narrative voice of the novel is, itself, divided would add a new dimension to the argument I intend to make, about fissures in Hurston’s holistic representation of the culture of the muck. Also, her supporting evidence about the evolution of the text is useful to thinking about ethnography and the novel.

5. Konzett, Delia Caparoso. “Black Folk Culture and the Aesthetics of Dislocation in Zora

Neale Hurston.” Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston,

Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation. New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Konzett argues that the recent revival in interest in Hurston’s work has valorized her representation of the “inassimilable difference” of black culture (72). Konzett, however, believes that Hurston’s works also break down the notion of a “monolithic” African American culture or tradition, and convey a sense of modernist fragmentation in black identity, primarily through representation of the various regional influences on black culture (74). Konzett spends the bulk of this chapter examining Hurston’s lesser-known works, which she argues represent a more experimental engagement with racial identity. However, in a short section on TEWWG, Konzett disputes Hazel Carby’s assertion that the novel is a romantic ethnography; she argues instead that Hurston’s “muck” section represents the profound transformation of black folk culture in Florida as a consequence of the migration of Caribbean immigrants into the state (89). Although Konzett does not read the hurricane in TEWWG, her notion of spatial dislocation as a force of cultural pluralism is useful to my argument about the hurricane’s interruption of Hurston’s ethnography of the muck.

6. McGowan, Todd. “Liberation and Domination: Their Eyes Were Watching God and the

Evolution of Capitalism.” MELUS. Spring 1999. V. 24, No. 1. 109-129.

McGowan suggests that recent criticism of TEWWG has focused on the novel’s “deconstructive playfulness”—particularly the playfulness of Janie’s relationship to Tea Cake—as a site of political resistance, where Hurston challenges rationality, authority, and hierarchical binaries (109-110). McGowan argues, however, that the poststructuralist account of “playfulness” in the relationship between Janie and Tea Cake does not account for the novel’s traumatic ending: Tea Cake’s turn toward violence and Janie’s final, violent response (110-111). Instead, McGowan argues that the shifting dynamics in Janie’s major relationships in the novel correspond to changes in capitalist development: from Logan (competitive capitalism) to Joe (monopoly capitalism) to Tea Cake (late capitalism) (118-119). McGowan raises some interesting questions about the novel’s representation of various capitalisms and Janie’s negotiation of those systems, but his argument—particularly his argument about late capitalism—seems insufficiently historicized to me.

7. McKnight, Maureen. “Discerning Nostalgia in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were

Watching God.”The Southern Quarterly. V. 44, no. 4. 83-115.

McKnight begins her essay with Hazel Carby’s criticism of Their Eyes Were Watching God as escapist nostalgia that ignored the most troubling political and social problems of Hurston’s era. McKnight agrees that TEWWG is a nostalgic text, but argues that the nostalgia can be politically progressive. She claims that TEWWG’s nostalgic treatment of the past can be seen as a way for Hurston to revisit a traumatic historical moment when utopian possibility was foreclosed for black southerners. Although I find McKnight’s use of trauma theory valuable, her reading of the hurricane scene is antithetical to my own. She claims that, “Hurston shows that nature indiscriminately destroys” and “Though nature seems ahistorical and a respite from culture, justice cannot be found there; it must be determined through dialogue“ (106). While I agree with her conclusion that Hurston’s characters find no justice in nature, my reading of the novel is based on the idea that Hurston understands the hurricane to be both deeply cultural and historical.

8. Rieger, Christopher.“Connecting Inner and Outer Nature: Zora Neale Hurston’s

Personal Pastoral.” Clear-Cutting Eden: Ecology and the Pastoral in Southern

Literature. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. 92-134.

In this chapter, part of a larger work on representations of the pastoral in southern fiction, Christopher Rieger argues that, in TEWWG and other works, Hurston elevates a wild, dynamic nature over the conventional pastoral representation of passive, benevolent nature. Rieger suggests that Hurston’s portrayal of nature is also shaped by the influence of Haitian voodoo. Rieger goes on to argue that Hurston representations of nature “outside” are symmetrical with the inner “nature” of her female protagonists, and that affinity with nature is a source of resistant power for characters like Janie. Rieger examines the ways that TEWWG represents the history of the Florida landscape, such as the draining of the Everglades. He argues that Hurston effaces the history of the muck because, “her primary concern is Janie’s personal development” (106). Rieger’s reading of the hurricane is symbolic: he suggests that it represents an eruption of mounting rage from the nature-aligned Janie (108). However, he also argues that the hurricane undoes social divisions—his example is Tea Cake’s difficulty distinguishing black and white corpses—that must be reinscribed by the authorities, who mandate their separate burials (107-108).

9. Yaeger, Patricia. “Studying the Waffle House Chain, or Dirt as Desire in Their Eyes

Were Watching God.” Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

In this chapter, Patricia Yaeger looks at images of dirt and pollution in TEWWG. Yaeger argues that dirt creates communities; “talking dirty,” in the manner of the storytellers in Eatonville, cements social bonds, but rituals of cleansing and pollution exclusion are also ways of defining and ordering communities (271). For Janie, getting “dirty” in the muck becomes a way for her to access a liberating sense of community, but dirt also marks the migrant laborers of the muck as and oppressed (273-274). For Yaeger, dirt in Hurston’s novel stands for the “exclusion-based rules” that define communities, but also the embodied pleasure of connection with a community (274). Yaeger goes on to argue that Hurston’s representation of dirt in TEWWG becomes a way for her to playfully reclaim the association of African Americans with the Earth and to “restructure the contamination associated with race-thinking itself” (274). I find Yaeger’s reading of the muck section of the novel compelling; however, her argument largely ignores the role of capital in transforming the Everglades and creating “the muck,” which I intend to be central to my reading.

Platt Eng 670