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

Abstract

As 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.