Modernity on a Global Stage: Hurston's Alternative Modernism

Abstract

Zora Neale Hurston's work has been subject of numerous re-evaluations since it emerged into prominence. Among features of Hurston's corpus that keep bringing critics back to it are its vacillation between hostility to identity politics and celebrations of black folk authenticity; its theorizations of black folk forms as either products of carefully distinguished local cultures or of transnational black aesthetics; and its ambivalent depiction of and modernization. The multiplicity of positions on identity politics, globalization, and that Hurston takes in her work has given rise to many competing critical versions of Hurston. A survey of recent criticism yields accounts of purely literary genius who chafed in confines of ethnography, radically experimental anthropologist, critic of identity politics, misguided dupe of primitivist ideology, and champion of black transnational cultural identity. (1) Each of these arguments addresses an important aspect of Hurston's cultural project. I maintain, however, that larger scope of that project is lost in these accounts due to an incomplete theorization of interimplication of discourses of identity, globalization, and modernity. In this essay I use Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) as test case, and show how text that is most identified with literary Hurston participates in critical interrogation of discourse of from point of view of subject on its margins. In so doing I show Hurston's novel to be part of larger project that includes ethnographic works that Hurston published before and after it: Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). My understanding of connection among discourses of modernity, globalization, and identity owes much to Malt Louise Pratt's global and relational analysis of modernity. Especially important to my project are Pratt's contention that discourse of is identity discourse of Northern Europe and North America and its resulting corollaries that call our attention to the diffusionist character of modernity and the centrism of metropolitan discourse on modernity (23, 28). The impulse to spread across globe might seem antithetical to project of retaining ultimate authority over what and who counts as truly modern. Pratt shows, however, that these two characteristics of discourse of grant interpreters of culture located at center a huge capacity for absorbing or creating otherness, according to argument he or she wants to make (28). That is, interpreter may pick and choose which aspects of lived on periphery to recognize as symptoms of full participation in and which to label signs of pre-modern survivals. I read Hurston's work as result of peripheral interpreter's unauthorized attempt to appropriate discourse of modernity. The inconsistency and ambivalence of Hurston's work as whole then becomes series of negotiations with and contestations of this discourse. The end result of these struggles, in my view, is Hurston's creation of an alternative mode of modernism that, instead of dramatizing perils or pleasures of particular totalized modernity, creates discursive space in which multiple claims to compete with one another. In her ethnographic work on black folk culture in southern US, Hurston challenges monopoly of interpretive power that Northern Europeans and white North Americans hold on category of by positing black folk culture as rival alternative modernity, not partial, lacking, or failed modernity. This strategy reaches its limit, however, when Hurston's experiences of gender discrimination in Caribbean show her that such an alternative may replicate structures of exclusion it rejected in dominant model. It is totality of this experience, I argue, that gives rise to Hurston's creation of an alternative modernist novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which she simultaneously shows destructive influence of class, gender, and ethnicity on black southern rural culture and expands codes of that same culture to critique itself. …