Dec 17, 2024 By: Kristin Rivero
Volume 9, Cycle 2
© 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press
If one listens closely one will note too that a word is slurred in one position in the sentence but clearly pronounced in another. This is particularly true of the pronouns. A pronoun as a subject is likely to be clearly enunciated, but slurred as an object. For example: “You better not let me ketch yuh.”[1]
—Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression”
When Zora Neale Hurston commented on the variations of African American dialect for her contribution to Nancy Cunard’s landmark anthology of Black writing in 1934, little did she know how her own personal combination of transparency and opacity—the ways in which, so to speak, she appears “clearly enunciated” “as a subject . . . but slurred as an object”—would shape her then emergent career. Hurston’s comment on how the vernacular can encode intimacy signals this article’s interest in the centrality of mediation to understanding Hurston and her exploration of the racialized subject. Hurston published her debut novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, the same year that she contributed to Cunard’s anthology. The overnight success of Jonah’s Gourd Vine allowed Hurston to finally find a publisher for her book length collection of folktales, which she published as Mules and Men in 1935. Hurston wrote Mules and Men based on fieldwork she had completed in the late 1920s in Florida and the Gulf Coast.[2] Hurston had taken a research expedition to her home state of Florida while studying the nascent discipline of anthropology at Columbia under the direction of Franz Boas (who had founded the Department there in 1902) and Ruth Benedict. By the time Hurston had found a publisher for her work in 1935, her relationship with Boas had soured and her future in anthropology was uncertain. Hurston’s publisher, J. B. Lippincott, had asked her to frame the folk tales she had collected with a personal narrative so that it would appeal to a popular audience. Boas objected to the concessions Hurston had made in order to find a venue for her work: not only the too-literary framing narrative, but also Hurston’s attachment to preserving the folktales themselves at the expense of the context surrounding them. Though Boas had originally agreed to write an extended introduction to the text as he had done for his other pupils, he ultimately only composed a short preface to Mules and Men.[3] In the preface, Boas praises Hurston’s ability “to penetrate the affected demeanor by which the Negro excludes the White observer,” which he argues is aided by “the charm of a lovable personality and of a revealing style.”[4] What Boas termed Hurston’s “revealing style” continues to elicit curiosity from her readers: no matter how closely they listen, will they ever know Zora?
Boas had originally recruited Hurston to do fieldwork as part of his efforts to train a new generation of professional anthropologists. His interest in Hurston specifically was based on her insider knowledge of southern Black life, particularly the region surrounding Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida. Boas wrote that “the great merit of Miss Hurston’s work” is “that she entered into the homely life of the southern Negro as one of them and was fully accepted as such by the companions of her childhood” (preface, xiii). Boas had hoped that by cultivating a new generation of anthropologists with insider knowledge like Hurston, he would be able to advance his investment in cultural relativism, a movement that strove to understand each culture on its own terms, instead of in relation to other cultures.[5] Hurston’s education under Boas drew from competing impulses that readers may recognize as a now familiar paradox for the production of the self in modernity. How could Hurston maintain her position “as one of them” if she also internalized the professional norms of anthropology that emphasized distant observation? (Boas, preface, xiii).
Hurston’s enigmatic presence as both narrator and character in her anthropological work and fiction alike has organized contemporary interest in her work. Whether critics probe Hurston’s status as an “insider-outsider,” as a “native informant,” or as a “participant observer,” they all describe Hurston as someone who mediates between different publics.[6] To view Hurston’s work through the lens of mediation is to appreciate her efforts to appeal at once to the professional audience privileged by Boas and to the literary public with which she found her initial success. This lens of mediation is also productively descriptive of Hurston’s experience as a light-skinned Black woman who frequently found herself moving between Columbia University and its Harlem environs and between New York and her fieldwork in the South and the Caribbean. Hurston eventually decided to drop out of her doctoral program after failing to secure sufficient funding. Her literary career was also short-lived—after publishing three novels in the 1930s, Hurston’s writing career fizzled and she, now famously, died in obscurity and poverty in 1960. Her readers are left to untangle Hurston’s formal disciplinary education from her literary ambitions and to distinguish between fiction or anthropology in categorizing her individual works. Hurston’s mediations as an author mobilize a sense of intimacy with her readings while obscuring her own position and investments. As a subject, Hurston is both “clearly enunciated” and “slurred.”
Since the publication of Alice Walker’s essay, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (1975), introduced Hurston to a new generation of readers as “Zora,” critics have questioned the supposed intimacy of Hurston’s self-presentation in her works. Walker’s essay, which recounts her journey to Eatonville in 1973 to find Hurston’s unmarked grave, precipitated the contemporary revival of interest in Hurston. Critical efforts to reclaim Hurston as an important figure in African American literature have often relied on the critic’s investment in “Zora”—Walker, as she mediates on Hurston’s anonymous grave, views it as “a threat to one’s own existence” as a Black female writer—but these accounts tend to emphasize her opacity or the intricate contradictions of her work and life.[7] By emphasizing the intricacy of Hurston’s self-presentation, critics belie the assumption that Hurston is essentially knowable or transparent. Hurston often situates herself as a character in her own work who discloses her thoughts and feelings on the page—and, likewise, as I will touch on, in the films and recordings she produced. She positions herself as a character in her own text in order to emphasize her role in transmitting and translating folk culture for a broader audience. Daphne Brooks describes Hurston’s “shifting” performance in one of her recordings: “At the center of it all there is Hurston shifting fluidly between the role of the folklorist and that of the informant, introducing songs, sketching out their socio-cultural context and utility, and performing them for a wonkish gaggle of folklore scholars who listen and prod her for details.”[8] Hurston’s efforts to position herself as a character in her own text have shaped scholarly readings of her work. As Jirousek notes, “Scholars discussing Mules and Men often describe Hurston as almost a character in a novel, rather than an ethnographer” (“Ethics and Ethnographers,” 22). So, if at times Hurston can seem to provide immediate access to southern Black culture, at other times Hurston places herself between her object of study and her audience, and brings out the extent to which multiple media connect them—their imbrication in the condition media theorists call “hypermediacy.”[9]
Because Hurston situates herself so thoroughly and ambivalently in the mediascape she affords, when critics write about “mediation” in the anthropological work of Zora Neale Hurston, they mainly do so to characterize how she accounts for the impact of her race and gender on the generation and transmission of her anthropological work.[10] This framing of Hurston as mediator is employed even on relatively formalist levels of analysis that consider her anthropological work and her novels more abstractly, as when Hazel Carby hinges her influential reading of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) on the supposition that Janie’s story is mediated both by Pheoby and by the structure of the novel itself:
When Janie decides to tell her story through her friend—‘mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf,’ she says—Hurston creates a figure for the form of the novel, a fictional world that can mediate and perhaps resolve the tension that exists in the difference between the socially constructed identities of ‘woman’ and ‘intellectual’ and the act of representing the folk.[11]
For Carby, the novel “can mediate and perhaps resolve the tension” inherent in Hurston’s work, a tension that exists because Hurston is both the subject and object of her own inquiry even when she is writing fiction. Along such lines, we might reframe what Frydman terms the “rhetoric of familiarity” in Hurston’s writing as part of Hurston’s attempt to project herself as a “clearly enunciated” subject.[12]
At the same time, just as media separate and obfuscate what they otherwise bring together, Hurston’s extraordinarily intimate presence finds her becoming a figure for mystery as well as transparency. When Alice Walker yells “Zora!” in the graveyard, or Valerie Boyd, in her 2003 biography of Hurston, Wrapped in Rainbows, refers to Hurston repeatedly as “Zora,” that the gesture of familiarity bespeaks authorial aura borne of distance as much as it does intimacy.[13] And when Hurston herself mobilizes familiarity in her writing and self-presentation, it allows her to remain “slurred” as an object of study. In many respects, the familiarity with which critics address Hurston mirrors the intimacy of her own self-presentation in her texts. In emphasizing the centrality of mediation to Hurston’s work, my aim is less to describe the extent of Hurston’s self-fashioning (which is considerable); instead, I consider mediation itself as the topic of Hurston’s inquiry. My decision to focus on mediation in my reassessment of Hurston’s artistic production during the 1930s and its critical reception is prompted by Richard Grusin’s recent work on “Radical Mediation.” Extending and revising the claims of his book that he co-authored with Jay Bolter, Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999), Grusin argues that despite the proliferation of studies about media over the last twenty years, the question of what mediation is remains undertheorized. This is particularly true of responses to Hurston’s work, where critics understand mediation somewhat narrowly as describing the process by which Hurston relays her object of study to her different audiences or as merely descriptive of Hurston’s position as a Black, female writer. For Grusin, “Mediation should be understood not as standing between preformed subjects, objects, actants, or entities but as the process, action, or event that generates or provides the conditions for the emergence of subjects and objects, for the individuation of entities within the world.”[14] Hurston describes mediation as such a process, while rhetorically deploying the effects of immediacy and hypermediacy to which, as Bolter and Grusin explain, the process of mediation gives rise (Remediation, 7).
Of course, to speak of mediation in Zora Neale Hurston’s work necessitates a discussion of the considerable overlap between theories of mediation and those of race. When Hurston writes in Mules and Men that she has to “see myself like somebody else,” it should recall W. E. B. Du Bois’s well-known formulation of double consciousness as “one’s sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.”[15] Hurston theorizes mediation through the specific media forms of her time: she does so not to ignore the significant impact of race on mediation, but to show how the specific media forms are themselves shaped by the social construction of race.
Given its emphasis on the ways that dialect mediates subjects and objects, Hurston’s essay on the “Characteristics of Negro Expression” suggests that Hurston understood the mediation of the self as grounded in the relationship between different media forms—sometimes termed intermediality—in this case between oral and written expression. Critics have often debated whether to read the essay as a “recording of the difficulty of ethnographic categorization” or “as an autochthonous critical apparatus that we can apply to works of Black art.”[16] Hurston’s example of how a “pronoun as a subject is likely to be clearly enunciated, but slurred as an object”—“You better not let me ketch yuh”—suggests another possible critical context for analyzing mediation in Hurston: the remediation or transcription of vernacular English. During the 1930s, Hurston was frequently chided by her contemporaries in Harlem for her use of African American vernacular English in her fiction. More recently, though, Hurston’s commitment to transcribing vernacular has facilitated her rise to her now assured place in the canon of twentieth century African American literature. Henry Louis Gates Jr., for instance, argues famously that Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is a “speakerly text,” which he defines as “a text whose rhetorical strategy is designed to represent an oral literary tradition.”[17] Since Gates, critics have examined Hurston “as a figure of orality mediating between the vernacular and textuality, creating for herself personal, artistic, and professional opportunities which, in turn, motor further mediations between orality and textuality” (Frydman, “Zora Neale Hurston,” 102). I separate out, and then recombine, two critical strands in the reception of Hurston’s work. The first strand consists of readings of her work that attempt to account for Hurston’s practice of mediation in ways that crucially anticipate what is known as the literary or reflexive turn in the discipline of anthropology. The second strand identifies readings of Hurston that track her translation of oral and vernacular expression into textual forms, what is commonly referred to in media studies as a practice of remediation, although few scholars of Hurston use this term to describe her work. Separating these strands in the critical reception of Hurston demonstrates how Hurston, when she describes her body as a kind of recording device, dramatizes the interdependence of these understandings of mediation. In doing so, Hurston links her understanding of mediation and remediation to her construction of her gendered and racialized subjectivity.
I advance my argument about Hurston and mediation through a set of three overlapping case studies: her discussion of then-emergent media, her engagement with cinema, and her commitment to transcribing vernacular. Throughout this article, I recur to Hurston’s tumultuous relationship with Franz Boas, using that relationship to gauge the particularity of her conception of mediation. As Hurston found literary success with her first two novels, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), she struggled to secure financial support for her anthropological fieldwork. Though many critics have considered the impact of Boasian anthropology on Hurston’s fiction, few have examined their conflict and eventual separation in great detail. Hurston was, in the end, an undisciplined student of anthropology whose commitment to recording folk songs and tales put her at odds with the increasingly professionalized and disciplined field of anthropology. Rather than viewing Hurston’s literary ambitions as inexorably in conflict with her academic study, I show how Hurston’s commitment to literary expression fed her theoretical interests in anthropology. Hurston describes her body as a recording device in order to think about how the media emergent in the 1930s could produce new possibilities for the modern subject. The article traces how the critical recovery of Hurston that began in the late seventies progressed alongside what is known as the literary or reflexive turn in anthropology, a movement that attempted to account for the role of the anthropologist’s own positionality in producing and transmitting knowledge. In his account of radical mediation, Grusin writes:
I argue that although media and media technologies have operated and continue to operate epistemologically as modes of knowledge production, they also function technically, bodily, and materially to generate and modulate individual and collective affective moods or structures of feeling among assemblages of humans and nonhumans. (“Radical Mediation,” 125)
My reading of Hurston draws attention to her understanding of the overlaps between the technical, bodily, and material functions of media. Hurston reimagines a personal relationship with media, arguing that mediation is not merely a process performed by the self, but one that can construct or create the self within and against the confines of an early-twentieth century media landscape characterized by classification and punishment in its treatment of race.
Exploring how mediation produces “Zora” as simultaneously a subject and object of inquiry can help us reframe the role of mediation in Hurston’s work more generally. As I have shown, critics have long recognized mediation as an act that Hurston performs in her work. This article asks what it would mean to recognize Hurston as theorizing mediation and seeks to regard her contributions to thinking through the possibilities of emergent media in the modernist age for offering new forms of representational agency and subjectivity. Hurston’s heretofore unrecognized contributions to what contemporary scholars call media theory counters narratives that frame then-new media as only contributing to the calcification of racial categories and visions of modernist media theory as confined to narrow schools or locations. This article, if it succeeds, bespeaks the necessity of recognizing the contributions of other African American writers to early twentieth century media theory.
Bodily Disciplines and the Mediation of Intimacy
Zora Neale Hurston arrived at Barnard in 1925 to study anthropology under Franz Boas and in 1935, she enrolled at Columbia to study for her doctorate in anthropology under the same tutelage. Hurston never finished her graduate degree. Hurston and Boas’s deteriorating relationship, and the diverging visions of anthropology it reveals, can serve as an index of Hurston’s interest in mediation. Hurston’s foray into and subsequent retreat from professional anthropology continues to shape readings of her work. Critics have mapped how Hurston began to develop an understanding of culture that diverged from Boas’s own theories of cultural relativism by cultivating a “type of professional expertise . . . that can be wielded by both sexes and can be possessed by both traditional and organic intellectuals.”[18] Though both Hurston and Boas wanted to understand the culture of the rural Black communities that Hurston’s wrote about using frameworks developed within those communities, they disagreed about what methods were best-suited to producing anthropological knowledge and the very nature of professional expertise. In particular, they disagreed about the role emergent media should play in documenting the folk.
At the time of Hurston’s collaboration with Boas, anthropology had yet to be fully-established as a formal academic discipline. In proposing a theory of cultural relativism, Franz Boas sought to distance anthropology from its racist origins. For Boas, advancing his theory of cultural relativism went hand in hand with transforming anthropology to securely situate it within the university. Boas and his contemporaries understood that they needed to develop a methodology that would define the field and its investments, and, ultimately, Boas determined that the next generation of anthropologists would become professional observers. He believed that “the methodology of professional, distanced observation” he encouraged a new generation of anthropologists to adopt “enacted a position of objectivity as a means of establishing discursive authority.”[19] At the same time that Boas suggested that the professional anthropologist ought to inhabit “a position of objectivity,” he was also recruiting students who had extensive ties to the communities they wished to study. For even as Boas worked to define the emergent discipline of anthropology around “objectivity,” he also understood that a solely “distanced observation” would fail to grasp those particulars of a culture that are only legible from within.
It was into this context that Hurston was recruited to study anthropology, first at Barnard and then at Columbia. Hurston was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama and spent her childhood in the Black town of Eatonville, Florida. Her hometown of Eatonville provides the setting for her most celebrated novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Eatonville is also where Hurston returned for her first fieldwork expedition in the late 1920s. In the introduction to Mules and Men, the book that Hurston published in 1935 based on her fieldwork, Hurston evokes “the methodology of professional, distanced observation” in her discussion of what she terms “the spy-glass of Anthropology” (Elliott, “Culture Concept,” xvi; Hurston, Mules, 1). In this section, Hurston shows how she has attuned herself to the disciplinary norms of anthropology that require her to “see myself like somebody else” (Mules, 1). Hurston describes the process of becoming disciplined as a process that requires her to shed the figurative garments of culture. She writes that the folklore of her childhood was “fitting . . . like a tight chemise” and that she “couldn’t see for wearing it” (1). Critics have shown in detail how Hurston’s reliance on the figure of the distant observer demonstrates the extent to which Hurston draws on disciplinary tools gleaned from Boas. Meanwhile, this particular moment of apparent methodological reflection forms the basis for many readings of “mediation” in Hurston that seek to characterize how she accounts for her own effect on the generation and transmission of her anthropological work. While I agree that Hurston evokes the concept of what we might call “critical distance” in this passage, she does so in order to call into question the illusion of intimacy in her production, her presentation, and, I would stress, her remediation of anthropological knowledge (Felski, “Digging Down,” 53).
How can we understand this moment from the introduction to Mules and Men differently if we understand the “spy-glass of anthropology” not just as a critical apparatus which allows Hurston to apprehend her own culture from an appropriate distance, but moreover as a media apparatus that necessarily distorts our view of Hurston as anthropologist by making her appear closer or more intimate with us than she actually is? The “spy-glass of anthropology” is what mediates between Hurston and her object of study; it also works to produce “Zora” as a character in her own work. Once we register the tension between Hurston as analyst and Hurston as the object of analysis, we can move beyond merely describing the illusory nature of objectivity posited by modes of distanced observation and instead articulate a relationship between intimacy and distance as mediated by the apparatus of the “spy-glass,” a handheld telescope that makes distant objects appear closer than they actually are.
Hurston’s use of the “spy-glass” figure is just one moment in her work where she maps together mediation with the production of the self. The “spy-glass” seems to suggest that the telescope (as a technology that visually mediates between subject and object) can work as a prosthetic for Hurston’s own perception, allowing her to see what she otherwise could not.[20] At other moments, Hurston suggests that technologies of mediation can produce the illusion of a transparent or fixed self not through prosthesis but by transforming the self into a media object. Early in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie recalls how a photograph mediates her initial understanding of what race means to her. Janie recounts her encounter with the photograph as an encounter that allows her to recognize herself as Black: “But before Ah seen de picture Ah thoughts Ah wuz just like the rest.”[21] Janie’s experience of looking at the photograph and seeing herself as other anticipates Fanon’s recollection of his own moment of racial recognition, suggesting the centrality of the visual to the construction of race.[22] Crucially, though, in Hurston’s formulation, this moment of recognition is mediated through a photograph. Though Hurston’s discussions of how the spy-glass and the photograph mediate the self differ in key ways (one is a discussion of an apparatus for mediation, the other of a medium in practice), they both link mediation to the production of the subject. In both cases encounters with mediation appear to reveal a transparent (or immediate) subject, but ultimately reveal the extent to which the subject is a product of mediation, or even inextricable from mediation highlighted in the condition Bolter and Grusin term hypermediacy (Remediation, 22).
Were readers to more fully recognize Hurston’s interest in the role of mediation in the production of the modern subject then her discussion of the spy-glass as prosthesis would recall Walter Benjamin’s contemporaneous discussion of what he terms the optical unconscious. The optical unconscious refers to the ways in which the camera works as a prosthesis that organizes perception. Benjamin first introduced the concept of the optical unconscious in his 1931 essay, “A Little History of Photography,” and he returned to the concept in the third edition of his “Work of Art” essay.[23] Both Hurston and Benjamin demonstrate how a media apparatus can appear to create intimacy—to make objects appear closer than they actually are—and how this process can in turn produce a distorted image of the objects themselves. Benjamin’s theory of the optical unconscious does not explicitly address race, though scholars such as Mark Reinhardt have done important work to “recognize how the visual construction of race has shadowed the idea of the optical unconscious at least since Benjamin first drafted the artwork essay.”[24] When one reads Hurston’s works from the 1930s, written across the same time period that Benjamin developed his concept of the optical unconscious, one finds Hurston theorizing mediation as inextricable from race. It is not just that emergent media, such as the photograph that precipitates Janie’s moment of racial recognition in Their Eyes, plays a crucial role in the visual construction of race, but that the concept of race shaped the development and refinement of then-emergent media. This is particularly true for the history of ethnography and the academic discipline of anthropology, which are not only crucial to the refinement of race as a social category in the early twentieth century, but which also developed alongside and through media technologies.[25]
Like Benjamin, Hurston also explored how mediation played a role in producing the modern subject through cinema. Hurston’s earlier, less-studied forays into cinema anticipate the primacy of mediation in her later works. While completing the fieldwork that would form the basis for Mules and Men, Hurston made several short films between 1927 and 1929. Equipped with a 16mm handheld camera, Hurston is thought to have collected at least twenty-four minutes of silent footage during these years. Critics have typically approached these films through an ethnographic lens, noting how even Hurston is implicated in the visual logics of early non-fiction films that produce essentialist conceptions of race. More recently, critics such as Elaine Charnov and Autumn Womack have sought to complicate what they see as a limited understanding of Hurston’s work within the framework of early ethnographic films.[26] They highlight the extent of Hurston’s formal experimentation in the hopes of situating Hurston among better-known pioneers of early cinema. In many ways, the recovery of Hurston as auteur has proceeded along the same lines as the reinvigoration of interest in Hurston as an author, with critics emphasizing how Hurston’s work is exceptional or pioneering in one way or another.
Discussions of Hurston’s cinematic work that focus on her formal innovation tend to do so by emphasizing her embodied camera work. Working during the waning years of what is known as the Silent Film Era (1894–1929), Hurston deployed her handheld camera in a way that anticipates the camera work of later periods, most notably of the French New Wave in the 1960s. Within film studies, the concept of the camera body refers to the ways in which the use of a handheld camera can transform the camera into a character of its own by emphasizing the movement of the operator. During the silent era, handheld cameras became increasingly popular, both as filmmaking became more accessible and as manufacturers figured out how to automate the cranking required to power the camera. Despite the increasing popularity of handheld cameras, most early filmmakers preferred to keep their cameras still, hoping to produce a stable image. Hurston’s films break from this convention: the camera moves, wildly at times, setting Hurston’s films apart from “many amateur films from the 1920s, which are marked by their static quality” (Charnov, “The Performative Visual,” 40). Hurston even inserts herself into several scenes, mirroring her inclusion of a personal narrative in Mules and Men. As Charnov writes, Hurston “engages the apparatus as an extension of her person, creating documents that have a participatory feel” (40). Womack has deftly assembled Hurston’s filmic practices under the rubric of “overexposure,” noting that Hurston inaugurates “a filmic grammar that oscillates between the recognizable and the uncontrollable, producing visually discordant and disruptive effects at the very moment when coherence is at stake” (Womack, “The Brown Bag,” 119). Hurston’s filmmaking mines the tension “between the recognizable and the uncontrollable” and produces, in Hurston’s words on which I have been troping, a “clearly enunciated” subject that is “slurred as an object.” The implications of this extend beyond the clarity or opacity of Hurston’s self-representation, especially insofar as she links the recording apparatus of the camera to the representation of her body. Hurston not only privileges embodied camera work, but also figures her own body as a camera.
Womack distances Hurston’s films from ethnographic filmmaking, and in doing so, her reading identifies one such link between Hurston’s engagement with filmic technology and her subsequent attempts to complicate the visual construction of race, especially Blackness. In Hurston’s short film of school children playing, children hold white placards in front of the camera. The placards are overexposed and thus difficult to read. Most responses to this footage of children playing have assumed that the placards contain identifying information, assimilating the film under the rubric of ethnography that is interested in the production of racial classifications. Womack counters this reading, noting that “on closer inspection, the white cards do not actually record identification data, but rather, they contain production information” in the form of reel cards (“The Brown Bag,” 121). The children are participating, like Hurston, in the film’s production. In casting “the boy as an active participant in the film production, and not a specimen of scientific inquiry,” Hurston may have wished to disrupt the racialized gaze of traditional filmmaking (123). In Womack’s view, however, the illegibility of the placards and the resulting ambiguity “undercuts” Hurston’s attempt to dissociate her work from the production of racial data (123).
Womack aptly notes that Hurston’s attempt to undermine the gaze is incomplete because of how the staging of the scene nevertheless recalls the specter of racial identification. The reel cards that Hurston has the children hold remain identificatory in another sense, in that they speak to the role of the filmic medium in the production of racial data in anthropology. We might also understand the placards as identifying the children who hold them as reels of film, thereby linking the children to the filmic medium that enables the viewer to apprehend them. Through the placards, Hurston identifies the children with reels of film, pursuing her interest in how different representational technologies and techniques mediate the modern, racialized subject. In particular, by identifying the children with the reels of film, Hurston draws the viewer’s attention to the film’s inability to correctly or completely render Blackness, the apparent technical cause of the overexposure that Womack describes. That the film’s technical limitations inhibit the intended representational project should recall the questions of how mediation produces a modern subject that appears both intimate and opaque. As we have seen through the example of the spy-glass and the photograph, Hurston theorizes the role of emergent media in producing this subject. Here we see that close link between Hurston’s theoretical interest in mediation and the specific media she is working in. When Hurston connects the children with film, she underscores her sense of her own camera body, and her sense of mediation more generally, as it involves her construction of herself as a recording device, and of her body as requisite to the resulting texts. Though her linking of herself to a recording device might otherwise suggest the impartiality of the resulting texts, Hurston’s description of herself as a recording device centers the role of her body in producing knowledge, enabling her to, in Grusin words, “start in the middle” in her account of mediation (“Radical Mediation,” 127).
Put differently, the mechanization of Hurston’s body here—she describes it as a camera or a recording device—might suggest either an investment in distanced observation or the shifting focus from her apparent object of study to Hurston as the ethnographer. However, Hurston’s emphasis on mediation—figured here through her identification of the children with the filmic medium as “reels” and herself as the media apparatus—demonstrates how Hurston understood mediation as an ongoing process that “allows for the emergence of subjects and objects.” Mediation is not only a part of the collection or presentation of Hurston’s work, but continually shapes her work, and as I have been suggesting, the critical recovery and ongoing afterlife of her work.
My troping on Hurston’s camera body illuminates how Hurston explored embodiment in order to emphasize the mediation of race, understood as the process by which race becomes a legible social category through encounters with media technology, in this case with Hurston’s camera. Hurston’s investment in making mediation visible, what media theorists describe as hypermediacy, and her rejection of a model of embodied motion, placed her at odds with not only other ethnographic filmmakers like Margaret Mead, but also with Franz Boas, who was especially interested in capturing gesture. When Hurston began her fieldwork, Boas instructed her to “pay attention, not so much to content, but rather to the form of diction, movements, and so on . . . [the] [h]abitual movements in telling tales or in ordinary conversation.”[27] In his preface to Mules and Men, Boas praised Hurston for capturing “the intimate setting in the social life of the Negro” (xiii). For Hurston, capturing “the intimate setting” of “social life” meant insisting on recording not just the context of southern folklore, but also the folktales themselves. This ought to have pleased Boas, who was interested in what is called salvage ethnography, understood as the collection of raw materials from subcultures threatened by modernization for future researchers to examine.[28] Yet despite his established interest in salvage ethnography, Boas seemed to object to Hurston’s investment in the raw materials or content of the folklore she collected. It may be that Boas viewed Hurston’s attachment to the content of the folktales as a sign that she lacked the critical apparatus necessary for analysis. He viewed the collection of the tales themselves as mere transcription, befitting perhaps the researcher’s secretary, but not a researcher themselves. Yet Hurston did not dismiss embodied motion altogether; to the contrary, rather than see it as crucial context to study, she saw it as constitutive of the texts themselves. Hurston would not separate the content of the folktales from the embodied motion surrounding them because she saw text and context as linked within the process of mediation.
When Hurston links textual production to embodied performance in her work, she suggests a complex connection between what Diana Taylor has influentially termed the archive and the repertoire. Taylor defines the repertoire as how “we learn and transmit knowledge through embodied action.”[29] For Taylor, the concept of the repertoire serves as a corrective to the limits of the archive, “the ways social memory and cultural identity in the Americas have traditionally been studied, with the disciplinary emphasis on literary and historical documents” (The Archive and the Repertoire, xviii). As overlapping modalities, the archive and the repertoire counter an emphasis on “the limits of paper” in recovering lives at the margins. Taylor contends that “embodied performances have always played a central role in conserving memory and consolidating identities in literate, semiliterate, and digital societies”; Hurston, for her part, relates how her body is shaped by its encounter with “literary and historical documents” (xviii). By recording her encounters with these documents, Hurston anticipates the efforts of contemporary critics to map the affective contours of archival research, including the experiences of critics like Alice Walker in engaging with her own work. By describing her body as a recording device, she posits a reflexive relationship between the archive and the repertoire, one that reveals how her body both mediates between her object of study and the resulting text and is mediated by them.
Moving now into Hurston’s literary productions of the 1930s, we can see that she imagines her body as a recording device not just through her manipulation of the handheld camera—through what I have referred to here as Hurston’s camera body—but also in her accounts of collecting folksongs for Mules and Men. Speaking with the folklorist Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston describes her personal practice of recording:
I just get in the crowd with the people when they sing it, I listen as best I can, then I start to join in with a phrase or two and then finally I get soI can sing a verse. And then I keep on until I learn all the verses and then I sing ’em back to the people till they tell me I can sing ’em just like them. And then I take part and try it out on different people who already know the song until they are quite satisfied that I know it. Then I carry it in my memory.[30]
Instead of recording folk songs with the aid of a mechanical apparatus or transcribing them into a written form, Hurston prefers to “carry” the songs in her “memory.” Speaking to Lomax, Hurston links the transmission of folkloric knowledge to the increasing accuracy of each successive “playback,” wherein Hurston gradually commits the lyrics to memory by singing the songs “back to the people till they tell me I can sing them just like them.” Hurston is not a passive observer who watches from the sidelines; she puts herself “in the crowd with the people” and participates in the scene. Hurston’s description in this scene of her dual role as both participant and observer is consistent with the frame through which critics have generally approached her work. While critics disagree about the overall effects of Hurston’s dual role, they do consistently begin their assessments by framing Hurston’s work as an act of mediation. In most cases, critics use the concept of “mediation” in their discussions of Hurston as a shorthand for how Hurston positions herself between her objects of study and her various audiences. Not only does Hurston endeavor to make the practices and expressive cultures of the rural folk intelligible first to an academic audience and later to a wider reading public, but she also strives to account for the role of her own body—and its at times conflicting signifiers—in shaping her access to and apprehension of these cultures.
Hurston’s linking of her body with a recording device has typically been understood as her rejection of both documentary fidelity and the mechanized tape recorders that would produce it. Hurston did elsewhere make ample use of recorders and a selection of the resulting recordings can be listened to at the Library of Congress today, including her conversation with Lomax I discuss above. Hurston accounted for her own body in the collection of folk materials to emphasize her understanding of the materials as part of “everyday praxis,” not as “stable, reproducible artifact[s].”[31] Hurston believed that folklore “was not something to be documented but something to be done” (Kadlec, “Zora Neale Hurston,” 483). In many ways, Hurston’s view of her materials is consistent with the popular understanding of early-mechanized recording devices. In his history of sound reproduction, Jonathan Sterne argues that though the potential of sound recording “to preserve sound indefinitely into the future was immediately grasped by users and publicists alike,” “the early practice of sound recording was significantly different” because “the first recordings were essentially unplayable after they were removed from the machine.”[32] Understanding how recordings on both cylinders and disks were understood as “ephemera” rather than permanent records reframes Hurston’s figuration of her body as one such recording device (Sterne, “The Audible Past,” 288). Hurston’s “playback” of the lyrics is not about producing a stable record of the lyrics; she does not understand them “as finished artifacts.”[33] Instead, Hurston’s linking of her body with a recording device can be read as an account of the ways in which her encounter with the folksongs has left an imprint on her own body. This imprint, like the grooves on the cylinders and disks, is altered by each successive playback. Hurston describes her body as a recorder in part to capture her investment in the remediation of texts from one medium to another. She was also interested in describing how her practice of collecting and transforming folklore produced Hurston herself as a subject readers would one day claim to know as Zora.
Attending to the specifics of each recording apparatus that Hurston linked to her own body can help locate Hurston’s understanding of mediation historically. Hurston does not isolate her understanding of mediation to any one media, but crucially figures mediation as operating across and between different media. Moving from the spy-glass to the camera to the phonograph is not to suggest a gradual refinement of Hurston’s grasp of mediation. Instead, her engagement with these different technologies reveals the centrality of mediation to her oeuvre. Focusing on mediation in general instead of on a single medium mirrors Hurston’s own understanding of her work. In her writing, Hurston frequently links different media technologies in a single expression.[34] For instance, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston describes a conversation on the porch as successive acts of mediation: “When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to” (48). An unfortunate consequence of Hurston’s obscurity at the time of her death is that we have only begun to realize the heterogeneity of her creative work. Not only is Hurston’s work spread across different archives, but it also is often stored within separate collections within a single archive, such as the Library of Congress where her work is divided by both medium and genre. Part of the difficulty, then, of accounting for mediation in Hurston’s work has been the contemporary tendency to isolate her sonic, visual, and textual modes of production from one another. Hurston would not only have viewed work across such modes together, but was deeply interested in exploring intermediality, understood as the connections between different forms of media.
Vernacular Forms: Transcription and Remediation
Hurston’s collection of folklore, Mules and Men, and her most popular novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, published just two years later, both explore the interplay among different forms of media. In both texts, Hurston preserves the vernacular language of her hometown of Eatonville. As I noted earlier, Hurston’s translation of oral and vernacular expression into textual forms has been pivotal to her critical recovery. Yet the critical emphasis on oral traditions has, perhaps paradoxically, occluded a full account of remediation in the two texts. Critics seem to agree that both Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God are works that explore how Hurston mediates between her community and her audience. What they do not do is link Hurston’s role as mediator, in a figurative sense, with the remediation of oral forms she conducts in the text. As I have tried to suggest with my discussion of Hurston’s description of her body as a recording device, the link between mediation in a figurative sense and remediation in a textual sense is found in Hurston’s descriptions of herself as both a product and a producer of texts—or, put differently, the ways in which Hurston is both the subject and object of her texts.
In Mules and Men, Hurston suggests that remediation is integral to not only the production of folklore, but also its content. One folktale in the collection, titled “How to Write a Letter,” investigates the role of remediation in formal education. The folktale, which imagines a young woman returning home from school, can easily be read as a reference to Hurston’s own experience returning to Eatonville to complete fieldwork. The folktale is worth reproducing in its entirety:
The man sent his daughter off to school for seben years, den she come home all finished up. So he said to her, “Daughter, git yo’ things and write me a letter to my brother!” So she did.
He says, “Head it up,” and she done so.
“Now tell ’im, ‘Dear Brother, our chile is done come home from school and all finished up and we is very proud of her.’”
Then he ast de girl “Is you got dat?”
She tole ’im “yeah.”
“Now tell him some mo’. ‘Our mule is dead but Ah got another mule and when Ah say (clucking sound of tongue and teeth) he moved from de word.’”
“Is you got dat?” he ast de girl.
“Naw suh,” she tole ’im
He waited a while and he ast her again, “You got dat down yet?”
“Naw suh, Ah ain’t got it yet.”
“How come you ain’t got it?”
“Cause Ah can’t spell (clucking sound).”
“You mean to tell me you been off to school seben years and can’t spell (clucking sound)? Why Ah could spell dat myself and Ah ain’t been to school a day in mah life. Well jes’ say (clucking sound) he’ll know what yo’ mean and go on wid de letter.” (Mules, 40–41)
In this passage, Hurston explores the limits of remediation for capturing the dialect and expressive norms of Black Southern culture. That the daughter is “off to school seben years and can’t spell (clucking sound)” seems a comment on the insufficiency of her own education in the context of her hometown. One possible reading of this tale is that Hurston is commenting on how the daughter’s acquisition of literacy ultimately distances her from the expressive norms of her community. In this reading, modernization, in the form of formal education, is primarily an experience of dislocation. What is curious about this tale though is how it is not just a story about how writing can render oral expression unintelligible. Hurston places this moment of failed remediation from oral to written expression within a passage that relies extensively on the successful remediation of dialect, the ways in which Hurston “put jus’ de right words tuh our thoughts” (Their Eyes, 55). That is, by preserving vernacular idioms of southern Black speech in her writing, Hurston suggests that the question of “Ah can’t spell (clucking sound)” is not solely about the ways that education can result in dislocation. Instead, Hurston is emphasizing the contingency of remediation—its ability to evince certain expressions even as it appears to conceal others. The didactic framing of the folktale as a “how to” further emphasizes the tale’s focus on the contingency of remediation. If the tale is in fact meant to be instructive, it is instructive precisely in the limits of written expression, of what it claims to teach.
Though it is difficult to ascertain the relationship among the various folktales in Mules and Men, the tale “How to Write a Letter” seems thematically linked to a folktale that appears later in the collection, entitled “The Son Who Went to College.” “The Son Who Went to College” tells the story of a young man who returns, also after seven years, and attempts to advise his parents on how to prevent their new cow from kicking when being milked. The son’s proposed solution results in a comical scene of the young man’s father strapped to the cow, who is now on the run. It is easy to assimilate this folktale under the same rubric as “How to Write a Letter”: as being mainly about the insufficiency of the son’s formal education when he returns home, an experience that mirrors Hurston’s own. As Frydman notes, “In her autobiography, she stages multiple scenarios in which her access to institutions of literacy—the university and literary patronage—enable her field work and yet threaten to cut off her access to vernacular culture” (Frydman, “Zora Neale Hurston,” 107). Yet the framing of the tale suggests other possible readings. Hurston’s framing of the folktale situates it among “a whole heap of them kinda by-words” with “a hidden meanin’, just like de Bible” (Mules, 125). Hurston suggests that the ability to unearth hidden meanings is unevenly distributed: “Most people is thin-brained. They’s born wid they feet under de moon. Some folks is born wid they feet on de sun and they kin seek out de inside meanin’ of words” (125). What is interesting about this passage is that Hurston attributes interpretation to innate ability—where someone is “born”—not her access to education. Just when it seems that Hurston is going to propose a method so that “they kin seek out de inside meanin’ of words,” she instead suggests that it is not about the possession of certain methodological tools, but that “Fack is, it’s a story” (125). What does it mean for Hurston to claim that the way to find the “hidden meanin’” is a “story,” not a disciplinary methodology? (125).
Boas had wanted Hurston to produce a study of where folklore happens—the context and structure of the expression—but thought that the tales themselves had been gathered “without end” (preface, xiii). Boas worried that Hurston’s investment in the tales themselves was not the practice of a promising anthropologist, but indicative of her ability to perform mere transcription. Boas, therefore, mistook Hurston’s transcription as simply the mediation between preexisting subjects and objects. He failed to understand that the tales were not stable artifacts, but a practice. Hurston insists on reproducing the tales themselves in addition to their “intimate setting” because she believes that the folktales cannot be separated from their presentation, that the tales themselves do not exist separately from or prior to their mediation (Boas, preface, xiii). In both folktales, Hurston emphasizes the contingency of remediation. Whereas “How to Write a Letter” is explicitly about remediation, “The Son Who Went to College” imagines remediation as it relates to the stories that allow the hidden meanings of words to become legible.
It was storytelling, not academic anthropology that ultimately held Hurston’s interest. Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God while completing fieldwork in Haiti with the support of a Guggenheim fellowship. Unlike Mules and Men, which Hurston had struggled to finish, Hurston wrote Their Eyes in just seven weeks. Hurston’s novel was met with an at best tepid reception among her contemporaries in Harlem. They objected to what they saw as Hurston’s overly saccharine portrayal of poor and rural African Americans. Their Eyes Were Watching God spends very few of its pages on interactions between characters of different races and overwhelmingly focuses on the social life within Black spaces. Instead of centering interracial conflict, Hurston focused her novel on the emotional life and development of Janie as she searches for true love and fulfillment. Hurston’s decision to elevate Janie’s emotional life facilitated the recovery and celebration of her work in the late seventies; this decision did not, however, endear Hurston to her literary contemporaries in the Harlem Renaissance. Despite the breadth of Hurston’s non-fiction work, she shows little interest in the aesthetic and political practices of social documentary that made writers like Richard Wright bestsellers. While Hurston’s politics are too complex and at times contradictory to adequately treat in this article, her reluctance to embrace social documentary is often cited as evidence of her conservatism. Reading Hurston in terms of social documentary is also difficult because certain aspects of her writing practice seem incompatible with documentary expression. Hurston lacks a formal commitment to the leftist political structures that celebrate the documentary impulse, as well as any discernible investment in the distanced observation or the fidelity of her representations (as her discussion of her body as a recording device shows).
That Hurston lacks any discernible investment in the fidelity of her representations is supported by her tendency to reproduce and reuse materials across texts. Many of the folktales in Mules and Men appear to be retellings of Hurston’s previously published short stories. While the sourcing of the folktales remains difficult to ascertain, what is clear is that Hurston did not hold her fiction and non-fiction in opposition to each other. Likewise, Hurston appears unconcerned about contaminating the folk cultures with materials she had encountered in New York. In a letter to Langston Hughes, Hurston describes reading his poetry aloud while completing fieldwork in Alabama:
In every town I hold 1 or 2 story-telling contests, and at each I begin by telling them who you are and all, and then I read poems from “Fine Clothes”. Boy! they eat it up! . . . You are being quoted in R.R. camps, phosphate mines, and Turpentine stills, etc. . . . So you see they are making it so much a part of themselves they go to improvising on it. For some reason they call it “De Party Book.” They come specially to be read to & I know you could sell them if you only had a supply. I think I’d like a dozen as an experiment. . . . They sing the poems right off, and July 1, two men came over with guitars and sang the whole book. Everybody joined in. It was the strangest and most thrilling thing. They played it well too. You’d be surprised. One man was giving the words out-lining them out as the preacher does a hymn and the others would take it up and sing. It was glorious![35]
Hurston’s account of sharing Hughes’s poetry with the supposedly isolated folk communities in Alabama is notable not only because it disputes images of the folk as cut off from modernity. In “making [the poem] so much a part of themselves,” the workers participate in the remediation of Hughes’s poem into an oral performance, and in doing so, emerge as “clearly enunciated” subjects in Hurston’s text. In turn, their performance of Hughes’s poetry has the effect of obscuring, or “slurring,” the supposed object of Hurston’s research, the folktales she is there to collect. As much as this anecdote evinces Hurston’s lack of a disciplinary commitment to anthropology and the discipline’s professional, distanced observation, it ultimately demonstrates Hurston’s theoretical import for scholars of media and modernism alike. And thus, for those of us that register Hurston’s interest in mediation, her desire to explore how emergent media can exceed its disciplinary tendency and ultimately produce new kinds of historical subjects, again illuminates the quotation with which I began this article: it is only in recognizing Hurston’s considerable contributions to media theory that we may begin to “listen closely.”
Notes
[1] Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in Negro: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), 24–36, 31.
[2] Scholars have more recently recovered another collection of folktales collected by Hurston in the late 1920s. This collection was published as Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folktales from the Gulf States (New York: Harper Collins, 2001). Though there’s considerable overlap between the folktales in that collection and Mules and Men, Every Tongue Got to Confess does not include the framing narrative or narratorial presence that characterizes Mules and Men. For an overview of the discovery of Every Tongue Got to Confess, see Carla Kaplan, introduction to Every Tongue Got to Confess (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), xxi–xxiii.
[3] Several of Hurston’s letters to Boas discuss her sending him the material that became Mules and Men and the plan for Boas to write an introduction. See especially Zora Neale Hurston to Franz Boas, August 20, 1934, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 308–9.
[4] Franz Boas, preface to Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), xiii–xiv, xiii.
[5] George Stocking, “The Basic Assumptions of Boasian Anthropology,” in Delimiting Anthropology: Occasional Essays and Reflections (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 24–49.
[6] Barbara Johnson, “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 278–89, 285; Kelley Wagers, “‘How come you ain’t got it?’: Dislocation as Historical Act in Hurston’s Documentary Texts,” African American Review 46, no. 2–3 (2013): 201–16, 201; Lori Jirousek, “Ethics and Ethnographers: Zora Neale Hurston and Anzia Yezierska,” Journal of Modern Literature 29, no. 2 (2006): 19–32, 19; Elaine Charnov, “The Performative Visual Anthropology Films of Zora Neale Hurston,” Film Criticism 23, no. 1 (1998): 38–47, 41; John Laudun, “Reading Hurston Writing,” African American Review 38, no. 1 (2004): 45–60, 45.
[7] Alice Walker, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” Ms. Magazine, March 1975, 74–89, 89; Rita Felski, “Digging Down and Standing Back,” in The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 52–84, 66. Felski discusses how critics tend to overemphasize the contradictions of the authors they study.
[8] Daphne Brooks, “‘Sister Can You Line It Out?’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 55, no. 4 (2010): 617–27, 623.
[9] Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 31.
[10] Daphne Lamothe, Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 2.
[11] Hazel Carby, “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston,” in History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Geneviève Farbe and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 28–44, 37.
[12] Jason Frydman, “Zora Neale Hurston, Biographical Criticism, and African Diasporic Vernacular Culture” MELUS 34, no. 4 (2009), 99–118, 99; Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” 31.
[13] Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Scribner, 2004).
[14] Richard Grusin, “Radical Mediation,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 124–48, 129.
[15] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 11.
[16] Sonya Posmentier, “Lyric Reading in the Black Ethnographic Archive,” American Literary History 30, no. 1 (2018): 55–84, 70.
[17] Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 195.
[18] Daniel Harney, “Scholarship and the Modernist Public: Zora Neale Hurston and the Limitations of Art and Disciplinary Anthropology,” Modernism/modernity 22, no. 3 (2015): 471–92, 473.
[19] Michael Elliott, The Culture Concept: Writing across Difference in the Age of Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xvi. For a reading of Hurston’s dramatization of anthropological observation skills in her fiction, see Lena Hill, “Zora Neale Hurston: Seeing by the Rules of the Natural History Museum,” in Visualizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 119–47, 126.
[20] Here I find Alison Landsberg’s discussion of prosthetic memory helpful. Landsberg argues that the modern technologies of mass culture, especially film, transform memory culture by allowing the modern spectator access to memories that are not their own. See Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 8–10.
[21] Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 9.
[22] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 89. Stuart Burrows also notes the relationship between Janie’s moment of recognition and Fanon’s discussion of the “fixing of black identity by the white gaze” in his study on photography and resemblance in American fiction. See Stuart Burrows, A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1839–1945 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2008), 159.
[23] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 251–83.
[24] Mark Reinhardt, “Vision’s Unseen: On Sovereignty, Race, and the Optical Unconscious,” in Photography and the Optical Unconscious, ed. Shawn Michelle Smith and Sharon Silwinski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 191.
[25] For an extended discussion of the links between race, media, and early ethnography see Brian Hochman, Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
[26] Charnov, “The Performative Visual Anthropology,” 38–47; Autumn Womack, “‘The Brown Bag of Miscellany’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Practice of Overexposure,” Black Camera 7, no. 1 (2015): 115–33.
[27] Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Champlain: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 91.
[28] Elliott, for instance, emphasizes the investment of Boasian anthropology in textual production: “Boas and the others investigating cultural difference in the late nineteenth century believed their study of culture required a professional methodology of observation and transcription, and therefore their enterprise relied upon an ambitious program of textual production that influenced, and was influenced by, similar documentary projects being conducted outside of anthropology, including literary ones” (Elliott, “Culture Concept,” xii).
[29] Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), xvi. I have found Taylor’s work on repertoire as a practice for producing knowledge particularly useful for Hurston because of its investment in some of the disciplinary debates within anthropology that I describe here. For work on Hurston and performance: Maria Eugenia Cotera, Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2008) and Anthea Kraut, Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
[30] Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, 168. Hemenway transcribed this quotation of Hurston’s from recordings available at the Library of Congress. Also quoted in David Kadlec, “Zora Neale Hurston and the Federal Folk,” Modernism/modernity 7, no. 3 (2000): 471–85, 483.
[31] Robert Sequin, “Cosmic Upset: Cultural Revolution and the Contradictions of Zora Neale Hurston,” Modernism/modernity 16, no. 2 (2009): 229–53, 242.
[32] Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 288.
[33] Leah Anne Duck, “‘Go there tuh know there’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Chronotype of the Folk,” American Literary History 13, no. 2 (2001): 265–94, 273.
[34] Kelley Wagers, for instance, describes how Hurston frequently remediates between visual and textual expressions: “The point is not that Hurston or the people she studied used images in order to tell complex stories (although they often did) nor that they used words in attempts to illustrate and elucidate complicated sounds and scenes (although they often did) but rather that Hurston used various discursive practices and systems of representation simultaneously, interchangeably, and on the same plane” (Wagers, “How come you ain’t got it,” 213).
[35] Zora Neale Hurston, “To Langston,” in Zora Neale Hurston, 121–22.