Signifying gender, race, and religion: Representation as political praxis in the texts of Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston's representation of religion is embroiled in gender and racial politics. By reading her representational strategies as a "signifying" practice in the tradition of Afro-American verbal artistry and on the model of "gift exchange" as developed in the work of Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu, I argue that Hurston's approach to religion unites aesthetic practices, religious practices, and the very practical concern of political control and domination.;Chapter one outlines a theoretical approach that combines "signifying" and "gift exchange" to read both life and text acting within and upon asymmetrical relations of social power, contesting, being contested, interpreting, misinterpreting, and constructing meaning in the process of social exchange. Chapters two through four situate Hurston's textual practice in relation to the historical context and theories of representation embodied within the literary interests of the "New Negro Movement" of the 1920s, the religious ideology that motivated the patronage of Charlotte Osgood Mason, and the anthropological approach to culture and race of Franz Boas. Chapter five examines Mules and Men as a signifying practice, operating within the exchange of these various interests, yet exceeding these interests to challenge hierarchical social-political arrangements in the areas of gender, race, and religion. Chapter six investigates the distinction between magic and religion that Hurston inherited in anthropology and the study of religion and examines how she deploys these categories in the practical matter of social politics. Chapter seven interprets Moses: Man of the Mountain as a fictional deployment of the categories of magic and religion that destabilizes rigid demarcations and social assumptions about religion, race, and gender. Chapter eight concludes with a review of representation and the politics of religion in Hurston's texts. This reading interrogates the way social-political power is constructed and deconstructed within the categories of gender, race, and religion.