Zora Neale Hurston and Modernism at the Critical Limit

Abstract

In his introductory comments to Raymond Williams's The Politics of Modernism, Tony Pinkney emphatically reiterates modernism's own fantasy of broken kin: modernism is not a kindred affiliate of modernity, and it is not, so Pinkney repeatedly avows, suffocating hopelessly within modernity's cognitive grip. One wonders whether such avowals of disaffiliation do not themselves misrecognize the problem from the outset, confusing as they do aesthetic and political oppositionality with notions of purity and definitive externality. Pinkney, who is representative on this point, imagines that modernism is for or against modernity, in turn abandoning the more pressing problem of how to theorize the fact that modernism is in and of modernity. By turning to Zora Neale Hurston, specifically her ethnographic fiction Mules and Men, we question the logic of Pinkney's familial metaphor for an understanding of the critical difference [End Page 285] modernism asserts against the force of modernity. Hurston, occupying a social, disciplinary, and critical position that is oblique to the dominant coordinates of high modernism, is thus our occasion to draw out the shortcomings of the willfully heroic narrative of modernism's break with modernity upon which critics such as Pinkney habitually insist.