Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life.

Zora Neale Hurston and a History. of Southern Life. By Tiffany Ruby Patterson. Critical Perspectives on the Past. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. Pp. x, 229. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 1-59213-290-1; cloth, 64.50, ISBN 1-59213-289-8.)

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), often associated with the Harlem Renaissance, was a productive and critically acclaimed, though controversial, writer of novels, plays, short stories, and autobiography. She was also an anthropologist who collected and published African American folktales from the rural South. Hurston's shifting literary reputation highlights the significant changes that have occurred in the study of literature over the last several decades: her writing once forgotten, Hurston is now a widely anthologized writer whose work is regularly taught in the college classroom. Literary critics rediscovered Hurston because new ways of reading, such as feminist and cultural criticisms, gave them tools with which to reconsider the complexity of her political and cultural situation.

The primary contribution of Patterson's book is to extend this rediscovery of Hurston into the discipline of history. A significant part of Patterson's project argues with the characterization of Hurston's work, most forcefully articulated by Hurston's artistic contemporary Richard Wright, as apolitical and unwilling to challenge the oppressions of segregation. Like the literary critics who championed Hurston, Patterson insists that there is a politically progressive agenda implicit in Hurston's emphasis on black life and culture and in her refusal to focus on white racism. The other major strand of Patterson's project capitalizes on Hurston's own credentials as a recorder of black culture to demonstrate that her work can be read as a historical source--a source that adds to our knowledge of the black towns and labor camps of the segregated South. Although Patterson's introduction suggests it is this second goal on which she intends to focus, the book is divided between the two: three of the six chapters examine the political situation of Hurston's literary production.

Patterson's strong defense of Hurston's writings as a source suggests that she anticipates an argument with her historian colleagues, but she is right to argue that dismissing Hurston's work as merely fiction prevents us from learning what we can about the people to whom Hurston had such remarkable access. By not utilizing Hurston's work, historians exhibit the same shortness of vision as Hurston's earlier critics, and as a result one of the few depictions of early-twentieth-century black southern life not constructed through an emphasis on segregation and white racism is lost. But finally, it is Patterson's use of Hurston's writings as data that is the most disappointing part of this study, not because they are an unsuitable source but because Patterson's commentary rarely moves beyond plot summary into analysis. Hurston's texts have the potential to tell us a great deal about the workings of the subcultures that she studied, but Patterson's interpretations add very little to our understanding of this period. The book is most successful when Patterson urges her readers to rethink the cultural and political situation of Hurston's writings. Patterson argues that Hurston refused to see African Americans as victims and objects, making them the active subjects of their own stories, and Patterson challenges historians to shape their understanding of the past through such Afro-centric perspectives.

LORI ROBISON

University of North Dakota