Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
International Eurasian Conference on Educational & Social Studies 4, Gostivar, Makedonya, 31 Mayıs - 2 Haziran 2024, ss.116-117, (Özet Bildiri) , Gostivar, Makedonya, 31 Mayıs - 02 Haziran 2024, ss.116-117, (Özet Bildiri)
In the foreword to his influential anthology titled New Negro (1925), Alain Locke who is the father of the New Negro Movement of the 1930s, asserts that the ‘essential forces’ responsible for ‘social change and progress’ are to be found ‘in the very heart of the folk-spirit.’ One of the most influential and innovative African-American women writing in this tradition is Zora Neale Hurston, in that she was a trailblazer in her endeavors to re-define what it means to be a “black” woman in literature and anthropological studies.
Both as an anthropologist and a writer during the Harlem Renaissance period, Hurston was singularly aimed at exploring the critical possibilities of marginality for African-American women for social change and progress in Locke’s aforementioned terms. Under the mentorship of the renowned Franz Boas, Hurston had absorbed — during her field studies a decade prior in the deep South where she collected folk songs and folk tales of many local black communities — to juxtapose the roles of being both an observer and observed while she analyzed the means by which how a certain cultural milieu shapes the subjectivity of its members. It is due to such an academically anthropological upbringing and her doubly marginalized status as a “black” woman in a white-dominated patriarchal culture, the author invented a remarkable narrative strategy that enabled her to give an authentic voice, both as a formal and a political concept, to an entire community of black folk in the rural town of Eatonville, Florida, and exclusively to the narrator/protagonist of her most acclaimed novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
Hurston’s text focuses on the character Janie Crawford, whose quest for the ‘far horizons’ finally leads her to a state of mind where she ultimately re-defines herself despite the lifelong impositions and expectations of a patriarchal society, conspiring against her creative force due to her gender. The aim of this present study is to explore the intricate narrative and rhetorical strategies of this text, which was included by TIME magazine in the list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923. By employing Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s methodology that he offers in his noted The Signifying Monkey (1988), the present study presents an analysis of selected scenes from the text to illustrate how Zora Neale Hurston accomplishes to give voice to not only to her heroine, but an entire community of African-American folk, who would otherwise sink into oblivion without Hurston’s affords to re-locate them on the literary cartography of American belles letters.
Keywords: Narratology, Anthropology, Folklore, African-American Writing, Zora Neale Hurston.