Zora Neale Hurston’s Two Early Writings of African Diaspora: The Story of “Going to Sea” and the Autobiography of “Colored Me”

Abstract

This study is on the early literary works of Zora Neale Hurston, an African American woman writer, anthropologist and folklorist of the Harlem Renaissance in the early twentieth century. Focusing on the period of time when Hurston began her literary career, this study aims at tracing the procedure in which the author’s perspective on black identity and the subsequent interests in the theme of the African diaspora initiated and developed thereafter, through a close reading of her two earliest literary writings, which are the short stories “John Redding Goes to Sea” (1921) and the autobiographical essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928). An authentic value of the study lies in the ways relating the two given texts, drawing the related topics from the texts, and developing the topics in terms of intertextuality. Reading the story of “Going to Sea,” this study discovers the two layers of time, historical and metaphoric, and the subsequent ahistorical time-space in which the black people's painful memories of leaving home, parting and loss transform into the joy of home coming, reunion and taking back, and accordingly an alternative survival strategy is possible for the African diaspora. Then the study relates such transcendental vision to the moment of Hurston’s recovering name and identity, represented by her rebirth as ‘Cosmic Zora’ who belongs to neither race nor time in her autobiography of ‘Colored Me.’ Like this, the study explores, through the intertextual space between the two given texts, the dynamics in which the survival strategy for the individual African Americans develops into a transcendental aesthetics of affirming life for the African diaspora.