The Minstrel Show Goes to the Great War: Zora Neale Hurston's Mass Cultural Other

Abstract

Zora Neale Hurston's known historical antagonism for commercialized folk music has implications for current understanding of Hurston's idea of folk and their tall tales, signified in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston writes: Everybody indulged in talk. He [the mule] was next to Mayor in prominence, and made better (50). character Janie, who loved conversation and sometimes thought up good stories on mule in an independent spirit that leads her into conflict with her husband mayor, Joe Starks (50-51), allegorizes Hurston's own need to oppose apparently monological discourse of commercialized forms of popular culture. In this manner Hurston's art reminds us of oppositional relation between some modernisms and their sometime Other, cultural commodity (Huyssen 21). Her known differences with left revolutionary politics of era in which her major novel was published diminish somewhat when one takes stock of common cultural enemy for African American intellectuals as divergent as W.E.B. Du Bois and Hurston, who shared a desire to articulate a sense of African American dignity in midst of a dominant social order offering through imposition of color line numerous oppressive indignities, including a variety of ways of caricaturing African Americans and their culture through new technology of media. As Hazel Carby notes, Hurston's 1934 essay Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals posits idea of inauthenticity of commercial culture's representation of African American culture in race records (31). One implication of Hurston's situating rural folk against mass culture is that literary and historical meaning of talk--both tall tales told on porch of Joe Starks's store in Eatonville of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Florida porch she mentions in her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks in Road (46-47)--should then be understood in relation to its mass cultural other, revived blackface minstrelsy and popular music gaining prominence in form of sheet music and new medium of radio. If talk in Eatonville of Their Eyes Were Watching God makes town's `talkers the center of world (60), one might well ask what assumed place of imagined cultural center until talking began. Hurston was concerned to establish authenticity in representation of popular forms of folk culture and to expose disregard for aesthetics of that culture through inappropriate forms of representation ... people she wanted to represent she defined as a rural folk, and she measured them and their cultural forms against an urban, mass culture. (Carby 31) Yet this urban, mass culture was itself often devoted to a certain nostalgia for rural culture of folk. Like Jean Toomer, a figure prominent in early stages of Harlem Renaissance who greatly admired folk music of south and lamented how black folk were taking to commercial music rather than to their own musical traditions, Hurston, emergent toward end of Renaissance, was a partisan in culture wars dividing respective identities of city and country. As Carby says, The of a discourse of `folk' as a rural people in Hurston's work in twenties and thirties displaces migration of black people to cities (31). Thus Hurston herself was drawn into some of dehistoricizing practices of culture industry that she attempted to exorcise. Carby's critique, one reminiscent of Alain Locke's historic criticisms of Hurston's dependence on stock formulas for her characters (Lott 236), foregrounds author's creation of a folk who are outside of history (Carby 32). Yet according to Robert Hemenway's characterization of her literary strategy, Hurston's purportedly extra-historical was a narrative fiction defined more specifically as adversarial to the racist stereotype of folk experience in American minstrel tradition and historical neglect of folk arts by black people themselves (ZNH 52). …