Modernity on a global stage: Hurston's alternative modernism.

Zora Neale Hurston's work has been the subject of numerous re-evaluations since it emerged into prominence. Among the features of Hurston's corpus that keep bringing critics back to it are its vacillation between hostility to identity politics and celebrations of black folk authenticity; its theorizations of black folk forms as either products of carefully distinguished local cultures or of transnational black aesthetics; and its ambivalent depiction of modernity and modernization. The multiplicity of positions on identity politics, globalization, and modernity that Hurston takes in her work has given rise to many competing critical versions of Hurston. A survey of recent criticism yields accounts of a purely literary genius who chafed in the confines of ethnography, a radically experimental anthropologist, a critic of identity politics, a misguided dupe of primitivist ideology, and a champion of black transnational cultural identity. (1)

Each of these arguments addresses an important aspect of Hurston's cultural project. I maintain, however, that the larger scope of that project is lost in these accounts due to an incomplete theorization of the interimplication of discourses of identity, globalization, and modernity. In this essay I use Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) as a test case, and show how the text that is most identified with the literary Hurston participates in a critical interrogation of the discourse of modernity from the point of view of a subject on its margins. In so doing I show Hurston's novel to be a part of a larger project that includes the ethnographic works that Hurston published before and after it: Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938).

My understanding of the connection among the discourses of modernity, globalization, and identity owes much to Malt Louise Pratt's global and relational analysis of modernity. Especially important to my project are Pratt's contention that the discourse of modernity is the identity discourse of Northern Europe and North America and its resulting corollaries that call our attention to "the diffusionist character of modernity" and "the centrism of the metropolitan discourse on modernity" (23, 28). The impulse to spread modernity across the globe might seem antithetical to the project of retaining ultimate authority over what and who counts as truly modern. Pratt shows, however, that these two characteristics of the discourse of modernity grant interpreters of culture located at the center "a huge capacity for absorbing or creating otherness, according to the argument he or she wants to make" (28). That is, the interpreter may pick and choose which aspects of a lived modernity on the periphery to recognize as symptoms of full participation in modernity and which to label signs of pre-modern survivals.

I read Hurston's work as the result of a peripheral interpreter's unauthorized attempt to appropriate the discourse of modernity. The inconsistency and ambivalence of Hurston's work as a whole then becomes a series of negotiations with and contestations of this discourse. The end result of these struggles, in my view, is Hurston's creation of an alternative mode of modernism that, instead of dramatizing the perils or pleasures of a particular totalized modernity, creates a discursive space in which multiple claims to modernity compete with one another. In her ethnographic work on black folk culture in the southern US, Hurston challenges the monopoly of interpretive power that Northern Europeans and white North Americans hold on the category of modernity by positing black folk culture as a rival alternative modernity, not a partial, lacking, or failed modernity. This strategy reaches its limit, however, when Hurston's experiences of gender discrimination in the Caribbean show her that such an alternative modernity may replicate the structures of exclusion it rejected in the dominant model. It is the totality of this experience, I argue, that gives rise to Hurston's creation of an alternative modernist novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which she simultaneously shows the destructive influence of class, gender, and ethnicity on black southern rural culture and expands the codes of that same culture to critique itself. Hurston's alternative modernist novel places the centralized language of modernity in a dynamic relation with lived modernities on the periphery, suggesting that such a relational account of lived modernities is more complete than the analysis, however thorough, of any one particular experience of modernity.

Close attention to Hurston's ethnographic writings shows her to be a theorist of modernism and modernity in her own right. In "Characteristics of Negro Expression" (1934), Hurston implicitly calls for a revision of traditional accounts of modernism and modernity by asserting that folklore is, in and of itself, modern art: "Negro folklore is not a thing of the past. It is still in the making. Its great variety shows the adaptability of the black man: nothing is too old or too new, domestic or foreign, high or low, for his use" (837). I think it is crucial to note that in this assertion of the cultural modernity of folklore, Hurston positions folk authorship within a series of charged identitarian rhetorics: race, gender, modernity, nationality, and class. The fact that it is the man who is at the center of Hurston's model of black folk culture will become a crucial problem in her later attempts to situate black women within this cultural field. While primitivist accounts of folklore work from the supposition that it is a discourse that emerges organically from a collective voice, Hurston shows folklore to result from a series of negotiations with and across difference. This is one of the ways in which Hurston's work places problems of identity at the center of a revised account of modernity.

Hurston's textual production in the thirties is explicitly and directly concerned with theorizing, representing, and staging characteristically black modes of engagement with modernity. Hurston's characterization of and attitude toward the concept of culture in general and black culture specifically has been the subject of lively discussion recently, much of which has been animated by a desire to advance a critique of multiculturalism and identity politics through revisionary readings of Hurston's work. (2) While I agree that Hurston does not fit the role that she was sometimes made to play of champion of female black identity, neither can she smoothly be pressed into the service of critiquing cultural foundationalism and identitarian categories. Hurston's thinking about culture is shaped by a desire to conserve authentically black cultural forms and the conviction that these forms are modern in their own right. If it seems contradictory that a modern cultural form could be in need of conservation, I suggest that this perceived paradox is an index of the influence that monolinear, evolutionary models of modernization continue to exert.

I am not arguing that Hurston should be seen as an exceptional figure for her time: an objective critic of what we can now see as an emergent form of globalization. She follows a well established modernist tradition of cloaking her social and political argument in terms of aesthetics while simultaneously diverting attention away from her personal interest in the subject in question. Hurston deploys this mode of argumentation most tellingly in her essay "Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals" (1934) in which she polices the boundaries of acceptable adaptations of black forms in the name of aesthetics. At the time in which she was working on this essay Hurston was in direct competition with other disseminators of the black folk tradition and she struggled mightily to stage "authentic" recitals of spirituals in her 1932 pageants The Great Day and From Sun to Sun. When seen in the context of Hurston's ongoing efforts to market herself as a source of authentic black aesthetics, her efforts in the essay to distinguish "real spirituals" which she calls "unceasing variations around a theme" from rehearsed, arranged "works of Negro composers or adaptors based on the spirituals" cannot simply be read as a disinterested aesthetic argument (870).

I suggest that Hurston's self contradiction her championing of folk appropriation on one side and this defense of folk authenticity on the other--should be read as an index of the contradictory position in which intellectuals from subjugated cultures find themselves. Frantz Fanon describes this predicament from the standpoint of African anti-colonial cultural movements as follows:

   While the mass of the people maintain intact traditions which are
   completely different from those of the colonial situation, and the
   artisanal style solidifies into a formalism which is more and more
   stereotyped, the intellectual throws himself in flenzied fashion into
   the frantic acquisition of the culture of the occupying power....

(Fanon 236-37)

Hurston's contradiction is productive, in my view, because it results from her attempt to occupy both sides of this cultural divide, and marks the beginning of her struggle to move beyond it. The dilemma Hurston sketches out for the black arranger of neo-spirituals also offers a direct insight into her own anxiety about transferring oral black folk materials into the conventionally white frames of the ethnographic monograph and the modernist novel. I read these two essays together as an implicit critique of the power relations that constrain ethnic subjects within the confines of primitivist versions of creativity while reserving the right to appropriative reinterpretation of hybrid materials to the deracinated modernist artist, in my view, Hurston's work calls for the development of a way to conceptualize global culture that does more, when confronted with the image of a threatened way of living in the modern world, than presume the inevitability of its demise by preemptively relegating it to the past.

Mules and Men, Hurston's first ethnographic monograph, offers a more elaborate example of her practice of politicized aesthetics in its narrative framing. Every edition of Mules and Men begins with Franz Boas's preface. Boas's signature alone imparts an authority to the text that Hurston and her editors at Lippincott sorely desired because of the text's unconventional style. While Boas's preface serves to place Hurston's narrative within a scientific body of ethnographic research, Hurston provides her own ending frame narrative, in which folk forms comment on ethnographic practice. The tale of Sis Cat occupies a strange place in the text: it appears not among the other folktales, but uncontextualized at the end of the book; a folktale intruding into the section of the text devoted to Hurston's study of Hoodoo in Louisiana.

   Once Sis Cat got hongry and caught herself a rat and set herself
   down to eat 'im. Rat tried and tried to git loose but Sis Cat was
   too fast and strong. So jus' as de cat started to eat 'im he says,
   "hol' on dere, Sis Cat! Ain't you got no manners atall? You going
   set up to de table and eat 'thout washing yo' face and hands'?"

      Sis Cat was might hongry but she hate for de rat to think she
   ain't got no manners, so she went to de water and washed her face
   and hands and when she got back de rat was gone.

      So de cat caught herself a rat again and set down to eat. So de
   Rat said, "Where's yo' manners at, Sis Cat? You going to eat 'thout
   washing yo' face and hands?"

      "Oh, Ah got plenty manners," de cat told 'im. "But Ah eats mah
   dinner and washes mah face and uses mah manners afterwards." So
   she et right on 'im and washed her face and hands. And cat's been
   washin' after eatin' ever since.

      I'm sitting here like Sis Cat, washing my face and usin' my
   manners. (Hurston 245-46)

The structure of Hurston's closing simile makes the folk character of Sis Cat consume and explain Hurston the ethnographer/narrator and the discourse of scientific ethnography. Hurston's folk framing of the text enacts a reversal of the basic power dynamic that underwrites scientific folklore studies: instead of ethnography explaining folk tales, folk tales explain ethnography, retaining bits and pieces of ethnographic propriety as "manners." That is to say, ethnographic collecting does not, in the composition of Mules and Men, consume folklore and arrange it into an authoritative, definitive collection of folk tales in their standard and variant forms. Instead, folkloric modes of creative appropriation and adaptation that Hurston has claimed as proper to black folk culture consume the form of ethnography.

Hurston's narrative framing specifically challenges the exclusive claims to knowledge production and objectivity made on behalf of the discipline of anthropology by Boas. Boas was prone to cast fieldwork as a project of heroic alienation that demands "that the investigator free himself from all valuation based on culture" (Boas 201). By reversing the hierarchical relationship between the culture of anthropological science and the culture of the black folk, Hurston implies that scientific objectivity is itself cultural. This would recast Boas's heroic narrative of the ethnographer's emancipation from culture as a journey deeper into the heart of what Karin Knorr Cetina would call the epistemic culture of anthropology. (3) This culturalization of ethnographic practices implies that knowledge production occurs not in the absence of culture but through cultural immersion. Moreover, it opens up a significant break between Hurston's characterization of the artist/ethnographer's role as compiler and contributor to culture and modernist theorizations that render the artist in terms analogous to the Boasian anthropologist. (4) One source of the alternativity of Hurston's modernism, then, lies in her awareness of the cultural valence of such claims of access to a realm beyond culture.

Hurston's strategic framing of Mules and Men illustrates what I see to be the political valence of her folkloric aesthetics by showing that even the cutting edge of social science can be consumed by and encoded in the figure of Sis Cat. The moment in which Sis Cat--a figure from a tradition thought to exist at best on the margins of modernity--becomes an authority on the practices of ethnographers--crucial protagonists of the centrist discourse of modernity--opens up a crucial fissure in the ideology of modernity. At this point in Hurston's project she dramatizes this inversion using the same terms as those employed by her colleagues such as Boas. This strategy of simply inverting the structures of interpretive power characteristic of modernist ethnography only remains tenable so long as the object that Hurston seeks to analyze, black folk culture, remains unified in opposition to the dominant white culture of the US. This unity is only briefly threatened in Mules and Men by gender difference, a disruptive force that only becomes more significant later in Hurston's career.

One index of Hurston's growing concern with gender difference can be found in her appropriation, adaptation, and redeployment of a folktale concerned with the politics of gender in black culture from Mules and Men to a quite different narrative purpose in Their Eyes Were Watching God. In the ethnography, the tale's reference to gender difference within the black community remains contained within the codes of the masculinist folkloric tradition. In the novel, both the tale's content and the form in which it is related offer a critique of the social silencing of women's voices that occurs within such a tradition of folk authorship. The tale from Mules and Men appears in the context of a lying contest between men about the origins of work:

   Know how it happened? After God got thru makin' de world and de
   varmints and de folks, he made lip a great big bundle and let it
   down in de middle of de road. It laid dere for thousands of years,
   then Ole Missus said to Ole Massa: "Go pick up dat box, Ah want to
   see whut's in it." Ole Massa look at de box and it look so heavy
   dat he says to de nigger, "Go fetch me dat big ole box out dere
   in de road." De nigger been stumblin' over de box a long time so
   he tell his wife:

      "'Oman, go git dat box." So de nigger 'oman she runned to git de
   box. She says:

      "Ah always lak to open up a big box 'cause there's nearly always
   something good in great big boxes." So she run and grabbed a-hold of
   de box and opened it up and it was full of hard work.

      Dat's de reason why de sister in black works harder than anybody
   else in de world. De white man tells de nigger to work and he takes
   and tells his wife. (74)

In this tale, the black woman's curiosity and acquisitiveness leads her to bring her workload onto herself. While the tale makes a glancing reference to the complicity of black and white men in the subjugation of black women, it also participates in the rhetorical structures that reaffirm that subjugation. In Mules and Men, this tale is immediately countered by a version in which the buck stops with the black man, replacing the problematic difference within racial identity associated with gender with a more commonplace account of white racism. Similarly, when male and female storytellers engage in playful combat with one another in Hurston's ethnography, the play remains safely within the acceptable parameters of a largely masculinist folkloric discourse. (5)

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, this tale reappears in the mouth of Janie's grandmother as a rationalization for imposing an unwanted marriage on Janie:

   Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been
   able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean
   where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but
   what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de
   nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to,
   but he don't tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger
   woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see. (14)

Nanny's account of the black woman's predicament and its incisive and accurate portrayal of the economics of slavery have troubled many critics. As much as we may want to, we cannot take Nanny's tale as an authoritative critique of the interimplication of gender and racial inequity because Nanny uses this tale to naturalize Janie's future servitude to her unwanted husband. However, I am interested in three specific alterations that Hurston makes to this tale: (1) the addition of an international relativistic flame to what had been a quasi-Biblical etiology, (2) the removal of the black woman's complicity in her subjugation, and (3) the shift in context from a public scene of masculine labor to a private scene of intergenerational counsel.

In order to chart the full range of meaning of this tale's transit, we cannot limit our examination to the obvious journey of the tale from one text and context to another. Instead, we need to consider that the first draft of Their Eyes Were Watching God was penned in Haiti while Hurston was collecting material for Tell My Horse. I contend that Hurston's experiences as a woman and a US citizen in the Caribbean thwart her attempts to identify wholeheartedly with Caribbean culture, especially in comparison to the ease with which her narrator negotiates her home culture in Mules and Men. (6) Negotiating this double differentiation makes her more aware of the significance of the boundaries that separate nations, genders, and public and private spaces, and of the way that they interrupt the presumed continuity of black cultures. Hurston's experiences of structural gender inequality in the Caribbean enforced her disidentification from what she had assumed to be a holistic, organic, transnational black folk culture. Instead of embracing alienation as an escape from culture in modernistic and anthropological fashion, Hurston creates a model of cultural functioning and belonging that operates across and through difference in the narrative structure of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Although she must leave behind the vision of an organic, unified black culture that she elaborated in Mules and Men, Hurston does not similarly abandon her strategy of granting interpretive power to figures on the margins of modernity. In fact, she further radicalizes this strategy by granting this power to a figure, Janie, whose race places her on the margins of US modernity and whose gender keeps her from participating fully in the forms of black folk culture.

Before coming to this point, Hurston must experience at first hand her own marginalization in the Caribbean. Jamaica and Haiti challenge Hurston to account for the exclusion of women from tools of folk cultural production and to come to grips with the transnationalism of black folk forms. In Tell My Horse, the kind of identification between ethnographic subject and object that Hurston achieved in Mules and Men is violently interrupted most frequently by gender difference but also by her sense of herself as a US citizen, and hence as a subject with greater access to the privileged and authoritative discourse of modernity than her Caribbean counterparts. Hurston's failure to identify is especially striking when contrasted with more celebratory representations of Haiti by her male contemporaries. (7) I suggest that this difference may result from a gendered difference Hurston's male contemporaries would not have been made to feel. For the purposes of this essay I will limit my comments to what I see to be the most striking instance of gender inequality that Hurston represents in the text, and to the revision of her narrative persona that, I argue, it motivates.

Hurston provides one quite disturbing glimpse of a woman who attempts to live outside of this order of gender. In the titular chapter, dedicated to the form of spiritual possession in which a loa speaks through an acolyte, Hurston offers the following as "a tragic case of a Guede mount":

   A woman known to be a Lesbian was "mounted" one afternoon. The
   spirit announced through her mouth "Tell my horse I have told this
   woman repeatedly to stop making love to women. It is a vile thing
   and I object to it. Tell my horse this woman promised me twice that
   she would never do such a thing again, but each time she has broken
   her word to me as soon as she could find a woman suitable for her
   purpose. But she has made love to women for the last time. She has
   lied to Guede for the last time. Tell my horse to tell that woman I
   am going to kill her today. She will not lie again." The woman
   pranced and galloped like a horse to a great mango tree, climbed it
   far up among the top limbs and dived off and broke her neck.
   (235-36)

Aside from the adjective "tragic," Hurston has nothing to say about this incident. Moreover, it comes at a point in the text in which Hurston has elaborated a model of reading the trope of being mounted as a blind for self expression, and directly follows an account of a malicious attempt to malign a young woman through this blind.

One reading would suggest that this tragedy serves as an authentic counterpoint to the specious mounting in the preceding account. However, such a reading would break the interpretive flame that Hurston set up by beginning her chapter with the pithy aphorism: "Gods always behave like the people who make them" (232). This frame encourages us to understand this suicide as a simultaneous manipulation of and submission to Haiti's heteronormative organization of gender. Even when behind the blind of Guede, which elsewhere enables critiques of social and economic orders, the nameless lesbian horse can only give voice to the dominant discourse and in so doing implicates both the gods and "the people who make them" in her death. Hurston's lack of narrative commentary bespeaks and exposes the inability of a masculinist public folk discourse to analyze and critique its own gendered exclusions. Furthermore, Hurston's silence indicates a refusal of identification both with the tragic "horse" and the culture with which she struggles.

As in her previous volume, Hurston concludes with a folk tale; however, instead of providing an explanation for her own practice, she offers the tale "God and the Pintards" to show how the Haitian people have survived despite themselves. While the tale of Sis Cat likened the ethnographer to a predatory trickster, in this case the Haitians are a troublesome and freeloading, although loveable, flock of birds that survives at the mercy of God and his angels. The framing of this tale is highly significant as Hurston obscures her own narrative agency through a strategy of racialization. She introduces the tale as follows:

   With all of their ineptitude for certain concepts that the
   Anglo-Saxon holds sacred, the Haitian people have a
   tremendous talent for getting themselves loved. They are
   drenched in kindliness and beaming out with charm. They are
   like the pintards of God that Dr. Reser told me about. This
   is a Haitian folk tale that somebody told to him. (273)

Once again, Hurston is mobilizing a folk tale to explain something that would be thought to exceed its purview: in this case, early twentieth-century geopolitics. However, the interposition of the generic figure of "the Anglo-Saxon" and Hurston's ascription of the tale's collection to Dr. Reser, the white administrator of an insane asylum, effectively displaces Hurston's narrative persona from center stage. In a narrative that is otherwise only held together by the continual presence of the narrator's "I," it is notable that Hurston represents herself in this passage only through the passive, indirect object pronoun "me." While Hurston's persona was central to the framing strategy that concluded Mules and Men, here Hurston finds it necessary to efface her narrative presence, removing herself from a narrative structure in which one cultural other, the Anglo-Saxon, comments on another, the Haitians. Hurston's disappearing act seems to place her in the very subject position which she refused at the end of her previous monograph, that of the doubly alienated ethnographer. Instead of professional scientific detachment, however, this gesture of narratological self-erasure indexes Hurston's frustrated refusal to identify with either of the two parties she leaves to end the monograph.

Hurston's alienation from the Caribbean order of gender forcibly places her within the subject position described by Boas's methodology of cultural relativism. The typical model for such an endeavor involves the ethnographer's transit to another culture enabling both criticism and appreciation of the home culture. (8) Hurston's deployment of this comparative methodology has gone unremarked up until now partially because, unlike her contemporaries in ethnography, she articulates the two sides of her argument in different texts of different genres. Hurston's devaluation of Caribbean society and her implicit appreciation of US gender roles in Tell My Horse leave her at an impasse at the close of the text, unable to identify completely with either the normative Anglo Saxon modern subject or the marginalized Haitian. To move past this point, Hurston returns to a fictive version of Eatonville, enacting her critique of her home culture in her depiction of US constructions of gender in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

While Hurston crafted Mules and Men as a textual paradigm of the functionality of US black folk culture, in Tell My Horse she produced a document marked by her conviction of the dysfunctional, radical incompleteness of Caribbean black culture, symbolized in its treatment of gender. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a staging ground in which Hurston can interrogate the problem of gender inequality within the sealed off space of Eatonville and its surrounding environs. Hurston cannot simply avoid questions of gender inequality and return to the highly masculine version of black folk culture sketched out in Mules and Men. Placing a female subject at the center of a text that would remain within the codes of the culture described in Mules and Men required a formal innovation as well. Hurston had to adapt her ethnographic style of narration to the task of representing the even more ephemeral, because less public, oral narratives in which black women could express their resistance.

While Mules and Men does provide characterizations of exceptional figures who transgressed the gendered boundaries shaping folk cultural production, such as the irrepressible Big Sweet and Zora herself, Their Eyes Were Watching God instead treats those who remain excluded. In so doing, Hurston charts structures of gender inequality by turning her ethnographic gaze away from public forms of expression and toward forms of private expression that cannot be collected but must be extrapolated and fictionally created. This redeployment of ethnographic narrative practice produces a new wrinkle in Hurston's theory of culture. The discourse of modernity implies that one is faced with a choice between functional and dysfunctional cultures. Hurston instead internalizes the critique suggested in Tell My Horse into a depiction of cultural functioning, suggesting that the alternative modernity she locates in Eatonville possesses the means to address and critically represent its own fragmentation. In this sense, Hurston's project of alternative modernism is directly rooted in her sense of Eatonville as an alternative site of modernity.

Returning to Nanny's version of the origins of work, it is now possible to contextualize this story as a private woman's critique of folk culture that Hurston's text makes public. Importantly, the story's sweeping indictment of cross-racial male complicity in the subjugation of black women remains enclosed by two containment strategies. First, Hurston contains this critique by placing it in the mouth of an unsympathetic character. As indicated above, Nanny's story is offered as a rationale for arranging Janie's marriage to an older rich man she does not love. Many critics have argued that Nanny's extended account of her suffering from which this tale is extracted places her within the "sobbing school of Negrohood" that Hurston criticized relentlessly and mercilessly in her non-fiction writing, implying that Nanny's diagnosis is thus nullified by association. In support of this line of thought, Janie experiences Nanny's rhetoric of victimization as an oppressive force:

   Some people could look at a mud-puddle and see an ocean with ships.
   But Nanny belonged to that other kind that loved to deal in scraps.
   Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the
   horizon--for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still
   way beyond you--and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing
   that she could tie it about her granddaughter's neck tight enough to
   choke her. She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the
   name of love. (85)

Nanny's application of the terms of her gender critique to her plans for Janie's future have the effect of foreclosing that future into a brief range of possibilities, exploited poor wife or exploited rich wife.

Regardless of Janie's hatred, the narrative proves Nanny right: Janie's freedom to indulge in her "love game" with Tea Cake at the end of the novel is secured via her status as a property owner (Baker 56-60). By placing this critique in Nanny's mouth Hurston is able to produce a doubled effect of both presenting a valid critique of gender inequity and an examination of the personal costs of living under such a critique. Put more simply, Hurston's strategy of containment dramatizes the coercive sides of both sexism and critiques of sexism and suggests that we often hate not those who create the conditions of oppression but those who explain how such oppression limits our freedom.

Secondly, Nanny's articulation is limited to the context of intimate generational advice since she has no access to public forms of expression. Janie experiences this same gendered exclusion from communities of public expression and she ends up, like Nanny, voicing her cultural criticism in the form of intimate conversation with her friend Pheoby. Hurston's critique then does not simply inhere in the words that she gives Nanny, which remain contained by Nanny's lack of access to the spaces where folk-cultural production occurs, but in the repetition of scenes of intimate female storytelling as the privileged place for the articulation of such criticism.

This is where I see the figure of the ethnographer intervening in this text. Ethnography, as Hurston practiced it, is a means of making a claim for the modernity of public folk-cultural texts and of ensuring their survival. However, ethnography's dependence on public forms makes it incapable of registering private expressions of dissent or internal critique. I do not see Hurston simply abandoning ethnography for fiction on the grounds that ethnography is not up to the task of representing this private world of female experience. Instead, I read Their Eyes Were Watching God as an attempt to produce a narrative discourse that has access to this private realm but does not transgress the codes of ethnographic authenticity. Hurston adapts ethnography's store of techniques for transliterating verbal ephemera into textual culture to the specific task of making Janie's private story of gender-based exclusion public. The tendency to treat Their Eyes Were Watching God in isolation from Hurston's ethnographies has led critics to misread Hurston's ethnographically inflected use of narrative discourse as a gesture toward universalism similar to the Boasian model she destabilizes in Mules and Men.

Hurston's critique of anthropological objectivity is especially relevant to the current debate over the status of identity in the attempt to forge a transnational, transcultural politics, a debate that has centered in a large part on the various meanings and genealogies of the term cosmopolitanism. (9) As one might expect, Hurston does not easily fit into the lines of argument, and it is her non-partisan status in this debate that makes her work so valuable to it. Hurston's conception of cultural identity as neither purely essential nor incidental and escapable adds a salutary nuance to often overly polarized arguments over the valence of cultural or identitarian politics. In closing, I turn my focus from Hurston's strategies of narratological framing, which I have shown to embed her texts within culture, to the trial scene, which dramatizes the complex series of negotiations that go into constituting cultural identity.

This turn away from the question of narrative framing is, in many ways, a turn back to Nanny's tale and Janie's rejection of it. Read through this lens, an additional drama emerges in which, along with the hard-nosed economic rationale for marriage presented in it, Janie rejects Nanny's tale as a repressive script of black female identity. In my view, Their Eyes Were Watching God shows identity, or at least an individual's sense of identity, to emerge from a negotiation with and transit through a charged field of potential identifications and disidentifications which neither are easily escaped nor irresistibly imposed. (10) The discursive field in which identity is constructed then seems to operate in ways that make it seem quite analogous to Gramsci's model of hegemony in which, as Stuart Hall usefully reminds us, "there is no pure case of coercion/consent--only different combinations of the two dimensions" (Hall 426). That is to say, Hurston's attention to the interplay between coercion and consent in the formation of Janie's identity complements her narrative framing by further emphasizing the cultural means through which identity is constructed and modernity is experienced.

A complex of identitarian discourses comes to the fore in the trial scene in which Janie is prosecuted for killing her husband, the rabid, deranged Tea Cake. This trial, which marks the only direct intervention into the text by the hegemonic forces of US modernity, separates Janie from the blacks who had been her community and instead associates her with an all-white, all-male jury of her putative peers. The collective voice of the workers on the muck begins to turn against Janie when she shoots Tea Cake. This acrimony is only encouraged by the workers' experiences in the segregated social space of the county courtroom.

By shooting Tea Cake, Janie reverses the structures of gendered power, violence, and ownership that he had mobilized in beating her earlier in the text. If Janie's acceptance of her beating was understood as a sign of her devotion to Tea Cake, her reversal of the one-way flow of gendered violence is tantamount to betrayal. The narrative makes this allegation explicit in a piece of free indirect discourse that recounts the imaginary collective testimony of Janie's erstwhile companions:

   Tea Cake was a good boy. He had been good to that woman. No
   nigger woman ain't never been treated no better. Naw suh! He
   worked like a dog for her and nearly killed himself saving her in
   the storm, then as soon as he got a little fever from the water,
   she had took up with another man. Sent for him to come there from
   way off. Hanging was too good. (177)

Significantly, allegations of sexual betrayal replace the actual murder charges against Janie in a substitution that I read to be a symptom of the workers' participation in what Philip Brian Harper has called the conception of "African-American society in terms of a perennial 'crisis' of black masculinity" (Harper x). Once represented as yet another assault on the perpetually besieged ground of black masculinity, Janie's actions rupture the solidarity she had enjoyed with the workers through Tea Cake.

The segregated nature of the courtroom and the prosecution's strategy of using only white witnesses combine to exacerbate the alienation between Janie and her former co-workers. Janie's complicity with the forces of segragationist order becomes apparent when Mr. Prescott, the prosecutor, rests his relatively ineffective case only to be interrupted by one of the workers from the back insisting that he be heard. In response, Prescott turns his powers away from Janie to admonish and threaten not just the speaker but all of the blacks present in the courtroom:

"We are handling this case. Another word out of you, out of any of you niggers back there, and I'll bind you over to the big court."

"Yassuh."

The white women made a little applause and Mr. Prescott glared at the back of the house and stepped down. (178)

Prescott's performance of legal authority exposes another gendered reading of Janie's predicament. Here we have a white man imposing order onto an unruly black man and his companions on the behalf of an almost-white woman. I see the applause of the white women in the audience as a sign of their appreciation of the prosecutor's defense of that cherished commodity that Janie partially shares: white femininity.

The trial's outcome has the effect of further isolating Janie from her former community. After being exonerated by the jury, Janie finds herself in a physical setting that perfectly illustrates the trial's effect on her ability to take part in the folkloric world of the muck: "the white women cried and stood around her like a protecting wall and the Negroes, with heads hung down, shuffled out and away" (179). The powers of the US legal system and of sentimentalist ideology forcibly draw a distinction between Janie and the masculinist world of folkloric blackness that had been hers. Janie overhears the opposing counterpoint to the court's verdict from the front porch of a boarding house:

"Aw you know dem white mens wuzn't gointuh do nothin' tuh no woman dat look lak her."

"She didn't kill no white man, did she? Well, long as she don't shoot no white man she can kill jus' as many niggers as she please."

"Yeah, de nigger women kin kill up all de mens dey wants tuh, but you bet' not kill one uh dem. De white folks will sho hang yuh if yuh do."

"Well, you know whut dey say, 'uh white man and uh nigger woman is de freest thing on earth.' Dey do as dey please." (179-180)

Where the narrator focused on the emerging affective connection between the white women in the audience and Janie, these disembodied, anonymous voices introduce multiple readings of the trial's outcome. The first interlocutor holds that Janie's appearance alone was enough to exonerate her, suggesting that despite Janie's earlier efforts to refuse the elitist Mrs. Turner's project of creating a privileged light-skinned class, she has been extended privilege nonetheless. The next two statements serve to place Janie within the rhetoric of the crisis in black masculinity, effectively transforming black women into insatiable predators upon black masculinity.

While both of these interpretations make reference to previous articulations of identity that have emerged in the novel, the final assertion is something new. The speaker's equation of white men and black women as bearers of equal privilege seems nonsensical both in our contemporary critical climate and in the novel which has so attentively illustrated the constraining forces that impinge on Janie throughout her journey. However, this observation should be understood as the result of a comparison between the power structures of black and white identitarian discourses, which are based on perceived crises of black masculinity and white femininity. Within this structure, this final assertion makes perfect ideological sense: to escape from the discourse of endangerment is to be "de freest thing on earth." Not coincidentally, this denouement places Janie in a position quite similar to that of Hurston's narrator at the end of Tell My Horse: caught between a white world that is not hers and a black world from which she has become alienated.

Hurston employs characteristically modernist gestures toward fragmentation and alienation in order to produce a revisionary model of identity formation. This model is sensitive both to the fact that subjects are unavoidably formed through interaction with inadequate hegemonic discourses of identity, such as race, and to the reality that no one can embody a universal or abstraction such as modernity, cosmopolitanism, or blackness. Instead, Hurston's work presents us with individuals who make up fragments of those categories, suggesting that the chore that remains is the painful and contentious task of constructing solidarities that enable an engagement across difference in the place of those that were posited on the assumption that all difference must be bracketed or excluded.

In conclusion, Hurston combines elements of forms that were instrumental in crafting the centrist discourse of modernity (ethnography and modernist prose) with styles and tropes from black folk culture (for which she claims the status of an alternative modernity). In her depiction of a black woman's travels in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston represents an experience of modernity that would not be recognized as such according to the codes of expression of either the alternative or dominant model of modernity. The novel thereby challenges the reader to recognize the incompleteness Of an account of global modernity shaped by an exclusionary, centralized discourse. This interrogation of the centrist thrust of the discourse of modernity distinguishes Hurston's alternative mode of modernism. While borrowings from ethnography and from the aesthetics of non-Western cultures are hallmarks of high modernist style, these appropriations typically serve to dramatize or add weight to the deracinated artist's view of modernity at the center. Hurston's appropriations, on the other hand, bolster her call for recognition of the ties that bind the center's experience of modernity to disavowed experiences of modernity on the periphery that would otherwise be passed off as pre-modern survivals. Finally, Hurston's expression of this cultural criticism in the form of a novel is also disruptive. Her imagined account of Janie's life serves as a fictional supplement to both the body of scientific knowledge by which the center's modernity claims to know itself and the set of authentic folk expressions around which black culture constitutes itself.

I would like to extend special thanks to Veronica Makowsky and the anonymous readers for MELUS for their insightful comments. Josephine Hendin read an early version of this piece and members of the New York University Americanist Reading Group provided a stimulating audience for another early draft. Patrick Deer and Cyrus Patell provided advice, encouragement, and difficult questions. Heather Alumbaugh read multiple drafts and her critical generosity has improved this piece in innumerable ways. Lynn Shutters is my partner in crime and my best critic.

Works Cited

Baker, Houston A. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

Boas, Franz. Anthropology and Modern Life. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1929.

Breckenridge, Carol A., Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, ed. Cosmopolitanism. Rpt. of Public Culture 12.3 (2000). Durham NC: Duke UP, 2002.

Carby, Hazel. "The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk." Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Casebook. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 117-36.

Cetina, Karin Knorr. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Gates, Henry Louis. "Their Eyes Were Watching God: Hurston and the Speakerly Text." Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad P, 1993. 154-203.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Hall, Stuart. "Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity." Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. New York: Routledge, 1996. 411-40.

Harper, Philip Brian. Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

Hurston, Zora Neale. "Characteristics of Negro Expression." 1934. Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New York: The Library of America, 1995. 830-46.

--. Dust Tracks on a Road. 1942. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

--. Mules and Men. 1935. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

--. "Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals." 1934. Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New York: The Library of America, 1995. 869-74.

--. Tell My Horse. 1938. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1983.

--. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

Joseph, Philip. "The Verdict from the Porch: Zora Neale Hurston and Reparative Justice." American Literature 74.3 (2002): 455-83.

Jordan, Rosan Augusta. "Not Into Cold Space: Zora Neale Hurston and J. Frank Dobie as Holistic Folklorists." Southern Folklore 49 (1992): 109-31.

Kadlec, David. Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000.

Newman, Louise M. "Coming of Age, but not in Samoa: Reflections on Margaret Mead's Legacy for Western Liberal Feminism." American Quarterly 48.2 (1996): 240-41.

Posnock, Ross. "The Dream of Deracination: The Uses of Cosmopolitanism." American Literary History 12.4 (2000): 802-18.

Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1970.

Pratt, Mary Louise. "Modernity and Periphery: Towards a Global and Relational Analysis." Beyond Dichotomies. Ed. Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi. Albany: SUNY P, 2003. 21-48.

Robbins, Bruce and Pheng Cheah, ed. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Trefzer, Annette. "Possessing the Self: Caribbean Identities in Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse." African American Review 34.2 (2000): 299-312.

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Leif Sorensen

University of Georgia, Athens

Notes

(1.) See Gates; Jordan; Joseph and Kadlec; Gilroy and Carby; and Trefzer, respectively.

(2.) Kadlec and Joseph are two recent examples.

(3.) Cetina defines an epistemic culture as "those amalgams of arrangements and mechanisms--bonded through affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence--which, in a given field, make up how we know what we know" (1).

(4.) Among the major proponents of this model, I offer T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Henry James as three salient examples. Eliot's and Pound's poetics share a commitment to intercultural borrowings and references that is best expressed in Pound's credo from Canto LXXXI, "what thou lov'st well is thy true heritage," a compositional guideline that can be seen directing Pound's borrowings and translations as well as those that make up The Waste Land (541). James likewise stresses an attitude toward culture that allows one "to pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically etc.) claim our property wherever we find it" (quoted in Posnock 802).

(5.) See Wall for the classic analysis of gender dynamics in Mules and Men.

(6.) It is, of course, significant that Hurston erases from her account of her fieldwork in Mules and Men her first failed research trip to Eatonville which she details much later in Dust Tracks on a Road. What is most important about this later account for my purposes is that Hurston ascribes her failure to her inability to leave behind "the glamor of Barnard College," causing the locals to treat her as an outsider (143-44).

(7.) I have in mind James Weldon Johnson's 1920s articles for The Nation and The Crisis; Langston Hughes's 1930s articles for New Masses, The Crisis, and The New Republic, and his 1936 play Emperor of Haiti; Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929); Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (1936) and Drums at Dusk (1939); and C. L. R. James's Black Jacobins (1938) and History of Pan-African Revolt (1938).

(8.) See Newman for an analysis of this methodology in the parallel case of Margaret Mead's gender critique in Coming of Age in Samoa.

(9.) A survey of the various projects and genealogies proposed in the name of cosmopolitanism would go well beyond the scope of this essay, but even the most cursory glance at the literature (the essays collected in Robbins and Cheah, and Breckenridge et al) yields a gamut of origins running from the Stoics to Kant to Jamesian pragmatism, and agendas ranging from ethnocentrism to radical pluralism.

(10.) In what amounts to a revision of Sollors's influential opposition between consent and descent, Hurston shows neither the rhetoric of consent nor that of descent to be ultimately determining. Instead, the rhetoric of descent only operates by soliciting consent, and identifications formed through consent can be interrupted by the discourse of descent.