Abstract
Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, considered apolitical by some readers, is profoundly political in its repeated undermining of hierarchy as an unquestioned mode of perception. Three formal devices in the text highlight this undermining: the free mule story and its chain of associations, the buzzard tale that moves from the inside to the outside of the free mule story, and the novel's pervasive physical imagery. Language that forces readers to juggle multiple and contradictory meanings intertwines with an acknowledgment of physicality — human sexuality, human death — in a powerful display of the limits of rational truth telling. Rooted in African American women's history, the novel confronts the complexities of racism and sexism while undercutting a belief in any monological understanding of person or politics, text or nation.
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