Constructions of literary and ethnographic authority, canons, community and Zora Neale Hurston

"Constructions of Literary and Ethnographic Authority, Canons, Community and Zora Neale Hurston" contributes to the scholarship concerning the contexts of Hurston's canonization within American literature and feminist anthropology. Within the past thirty years, Zora Neale Hurston and her literary productions have been widely recognized in the canons of African American literature, women's literature, and American literature. Within the field of feminist anthropology, her anthropological work remains at the margins. Through a historical case study approach, this dissertation critically examines Hurston's contemporary literary reception (1970s-present) and cultural icon status to describe the material and interpretive contexts of Hurston's rise in the literary canon. I also address the corresponding critical reception of Hurston's ethnographic work, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), within feminist anthropology. I find that both Hurston's literary authority and ethnographic authority were greatly impacted by overlapping critical trends in black feminist literary theory, African American literary theory, and post-structuralist theory.;Hurston's work has become a central and often token representation of black female subjectivity in critical literary studies. Critical assessments within feminist anthropology have defined Hurston's ethnographies as unusually experimental and, in some instances, unauthoritative. Across both fields, Hurston is often represented as a sole or central example of experimental ethnographic production during the 1930s. In addition, readings of Hurston's ethnographies within feminist anthropology have not considered the impact of American literary realism on Hurston's ethnographies. I comparatively read Hurston's Mules and Men (1935), Charles Johnson's Shadow of the Plantation (1934), and Hortense Powdermaker's After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South (1939) as experimental ethnographic productions that were influenced by trends in American literary realism during the 1920s and 1930s. Situating Hurston's ethnographic productions within this historic frame broadens our understanding of her work as part of a community of scholars breaking methodological ground in describing and defining African American culture and life.