Anxious Origins: Zora Neale Hurston and the Global South, 1927-1942

Abstract

Zora Neale Hurston's autoethnographic trilogy of the Global South - Mules and Men (1935), Tell My Horse (1938), and Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) - charts a geocultural terrain that recovers transgressive histories otherwise erased from public historical discourse. The medium is the message: penned in dialect obscuring the subversive "inside meanin' of words," her folklore collections split the historical archive wide open by incorporating the lives and deaths of "unreal" bodies into a preexisting narrative of Southern subjugation. These politically subversive tales of agency and resistance enact a dynamic, malleable, intergenerational mode of oral history that suggests the unfinished work of mourning for that which is no longer there. Trained as an anthropologist at Columbia University yet distrustful of the profession's intentions, Hurston confronts her own ambivalence towards the ethnographic archive throughout her career dedicated to (re)tracing these anxious origins, prefigured as both genetically specific and racially mythologized, across a region beset by a politics of racialized loss. In fighting to make these "unreal" lives legible, her autoethnographic trilogy offers a model of the interplay between the affective state of melancholia and the literary imagination. Within this multifaceted portrait of the Global South, Hurston reconciles private memory with public history in order to underscore the social dynamics at work in determining the contours of acceptable loss.