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Sweat: the Exodus from Physical and Mental Enslavement to Emotional and Spiritual Liberation
University of Central Florida STARS Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019 2007 Sweat: The Exodus From Physical And Mental Enslavement To Emotional And Spiritual Liberation Aqueelah Roberson University of Central Florida Part of the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Find similar works at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd University of Central Florida Libraries http://library.ucf.edu This Masters Thesis (Open Access) is brought to you for free and open access by STARS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019 by an authorized administrator of STARS. For more information, please contact [email protected]. STARS Citation Roberson, Aqueelah, "Sweat: The Exodus From Physical And Mental Enslavement To Emotional And Spiritual Liberation" (2007). Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019. 3319. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/3319 SWEAT: THE EXODUS FROM PHYSICAL AND MENTAL ENSLAVEMENT TO EMOTIONAL AND SPIRITUAL LIBERATION by AQUEELAH KHALILAH ROBERSON B.A., North Carolina Central University, 2004 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in the Department of Theatre in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida Spring Term 2007 © 2007 Aqueelah Khalilah Roberson ii ABSTRACT The purpose of this thesis is to showcase the importance of God-inspired Theatre and to manifest the transformative effects of living in accordance to the Word of God. In order to share my vision for theatre such as this, I will examine the biblical elements in Zora Neale Hurston’s short story Sweat (1926). I will write a stage adaptation of the story, while placing emphasis on the biblical lessons that can be used for God-inspired Theatre. -
Jonah's Gourd Vine and South Moon Under As New Southern Pastoral
Re-Visioning Nature: Jonah’s Gourd Vine and South Moon Under as New Southern Pastoral Kyoko Shoji Hearn Introduction Despite their well-known personal correspondence, few critical studies read the works of two Southern women writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings together. Both of them began to thrive in their literary career after they moved to Florida and published their first novels, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and South Moon Under (1933). When they came down to central Florida (Hurston, grown up in Eatonville, and coming back as an anthropological researcher, Rawlings as an owner of citrus grove property) in the late 1920s, the region had undergone significant social and economic changes. During the 1920s, Florida saw massive influx of people from varying social strata against the backdrop of the unprecedented land boom, the expansion of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, the statewide growth of tourism, and the development of agriculture including the citrus industry in central Florida.1 Hurston’s and Rawlings’s relocation was a part of this mobility. Rawlings’s first visit to Florida occurred in March 1928, when she and her husband Charles had a vacation trip. Immediately attracted by the region’s charm, the couple migrated from Rochester, New York, to be a part of booming citrus industry.2 Hurston was aware of the population shift taking place in her home state and took it up in her work. At the opening of Mules and Men (1935), she writes: “Dr. Boas asked me where I wanted to work and I said, ‘Florida,’ and gave, as my big reason, that ‘Florida is a place that draws people—white people from all over the world, and Negroes from every Southern state surely and some from the North and West.’ So I knew that it was possible for me to get a cross section of the Negro South in the one state” (9). -
The Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston: an Assertion of Black Womanhood
THE FICTION OF ZORA NEALE HURSTON: AN ASSERTION OF BLACK WOMANHOOD Rita T. Schmidt Contrary to what official historical records show, recent studies convincingly prove that women have been writing for centuries, in a variety of literary modes and genres. However, an historical examina- tion of the role of woman as writer reveals that she has suffered from the persistent cultural ideal of woman's silence, an invisibility which has rendered her works marginal to what the guardians of the great tradition call 'the serious enterprise of art.' Denied legitimacy for so long by a traditional canon which has prescribed standards of literary excellence on the basis of pre-existing social bias, women writers are just beginning to be reviewed in major literary publications, included in literary histories and university curricula as a result of the efforts geared to the body of studies in literature which has emerged as an im- portant part of the post-60's upsurge of work in woman's studies, espe- cially in the United States. Certain ideas, perpetuated in the theory and practice of literature, (such as the domain of the male creator through whose agency and power man acquired the Word, becoming the sacer vates, or the exclusively male transcendental images of LreAtivity as opposed to earth-bound images of female nature), which have invested all significance in the experience, ideas and discourse of men, are now being called to question. Retrieving woman's texts and the literary expression of the female experience is a sign of basic chan- ges in the consciousness of western art and society and a task in which we all should join as professionals concerned with the relationship be- tween women and literature. -
Zora Neale Hurston Daryl Cumber Dance University of Richmond, [email protected]
University of Richmond UR Scholarship Repository English Faculty Publications English 1983 Zora Neale Hurston Daryl Cumber Dance University of Richmond, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/english-faculty-publications Part of the African American Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, Caribbean Languages and Societies Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Dance, Daryl Cumber. "Zora Neale Hurston." In American Women Writers: Bibliographical Essays, edited by Maurice Duke, Jackson R. Bryer, and M. Thomas Inge, 321-51. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983. This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the English at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 12 DARYL C. DANCE Zora Neale Hurston She was flamboyant and yet vulnerable, self-centered and yet kind, a Republican conservative and yet an early black nationalist. Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977 There is certainly no more controversial figure in American literature than Zora Neale Hurston. Even the most common details, easily ascertainable for most people, have been variously interpreted or have remained un resolved issues in her case: When was she born? Was her name spelled Neal, Neale, or Neil? Whom did she marry? How many times was she married? What happened to her after she wrote Seraph on the Suwanee? Even so immediately observable a physical quality as her complexion sparks con troversy, as is illustrated by Mary Helen Washington in "Zora Neale Hurston: A Woman Half in Shadow," Introduction to I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . -
Mobility and the Literary Imagination of Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2013 Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Kyoko Shoji Hearn University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Hearn, Kyoko Shoji, "Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings" (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 552. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/552 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. NARRATIVES OF SOUTHERN CONTACT ZONES: MOBILITY AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION OF ZORA NEALE HURSTON AND MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS A Dissertation Presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English The University of Mississippi by KYOKO SHOJI HEARN December 2013 Copyright Kyoko Shoji Hearn 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the literary works of the two Southern women writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, based on the cultural contexts of the 1930s and the 1940s. It discusses how the two writers’ works are in dialogue with each other, and with the particular historical period in which the South had gone through many social, economical, and cultural changes. Hurston and Rawlings, who became friends with each other beyond their racial background in the segregated South, shared physical and social mobility and the interest in the Southern folk cultures. -
Hurston and Her Other Works
Hurston and Her Other Works their gods, we are lost." For her, these gods dwelt in the music, dance, and stories of folk Zora Neale Hurston's writing career took off culture. The two collections of folklore she when Charles S. Johnson published her early published in her lifetime were remarkable, as no short stories, which featured characters other writer was trying to do what she was altogether unlike those of her contemporaries. doing. Delia Jones from "Sweat" (1926) uses her wits to outsmart her abusive, unfaithful husband. Missie May from "The Gilded-Six Bits" (1933) Mules and Men (1935) was the first great reclaims her sexuality after bearing a child collection of black American folktales and within her marriage. These women diverged hoodoo material from New Orleans, including from prevailing stereotypes for black women in over sixty-five folktales, such as "How Jack fiction: the overweight mammy, the tragic Beat the Devil," "Why Women Take Advantage of Men," and "The Talking Mule." Her second mulatto, the promiscuous Jezebel. collection, Tell My Horse (1938), gives an eyewitness account of the mysteries of voodoo This complexity deepens in Hurston's novels. in Haiti and Jamaica. The appendix includes The omniscient narrator of her first novel, Negro songs, another lifelong love of Hurston's. Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), neither indulges nor condemns its errant protagonist, the preacher John Buddy Pearson. (Hurston drew from her Her unconventional 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, consciously blurs the line parents' tumultuous history for inspiration here, between fact and fiction. She completed the but the adaptation was far from literal.) book while employed as a story consultant for Paramount Studios in Los Angeles. -
RIDING the TORTOISE a Poem Based on the Life of Zora Neale Hurston
RIDING THE TORTOISE A poem based on the life of Zora Neale Hurston “I shall try to lay my dreaming aside. Try hard. But, Oh, if you knew my dreams! My vaulting ambition! How I constantly live in fancy In seven league boots, taking mighty strides across the world, But conscious all the time of being A mouse on a treadmill. Madness ensues. I am beside myself with chagrin half of the time; The way to the blue hills is not on tortoise back, It seems to me, But on wings. I haven’t the wings, And must ride the tortoise.” ZORA NEALE HURSTON For a woman whose nightly private theatre of dreams Were filled with premonitions Of success, of danger, of heartache Zora Neale Hurston had the tortoise vision right- A mighty talent full of ambition Who crept slowly on her journey from The sunshine state, to the big apple, to the city of jazz And all around And back again All the while losing the sprint To the hares of a different race. If she were here now Zora would be up on the tables The type of woman who never had a tab Didn’t need one- beers offered all night from Bartender’s hands to patron’s hands to listeners hands Into Zora’s. Zora who was here to entertain, here to immerse herself into You and your life and You and your culture You and your zombies Your hoodoo Your history Your blackness Your voice Anything that covered what other people, white people, weren’t saying For you About you As she said - she knew black people to “Love and hate and fight and play and strive and travel and Have a thousand and one interests in life like all other humans.” Racial injustice, it turns out, is not the only topic set at every table. -
Politics, Identity and Humor in the Work of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Sholem Aleichem and Mordkhe Spector
The Artist and the Folk: Politics, Identity and Humor in the Work of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Sholem Aleichem and Mordkhe Spector by Alexandra Hoffman A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Comparative Literature) in The University of Michigan 2012 Doctoral Committee: Professor Anita Norich, Chair Professor Sandra Gunning Associate Professor Mikhail Krutikov Associate Professor Christi Merrill Associate Professor Joshua Miller Acknowledgements I am delighted that the writing process was only occasionally a lonely affair, since I’ve had the privilege of having a generous committee, a great range of inspiring instructors and fellow graduate students, and intelligent students. The burden of producing an original piece of scholarship was made less daunting through collaboration with these wonderful people. In many ways this text is a web I weaved out of the combination of our thoughts, expressions, arguments and conversations. I thank Professor Sandra Gunning for her encouragement, her commitment to interdisciplinarity, and her practical guidance; she never made me doubt that what I’m doing is important. I thank Professor Mikhail Krutikov for his seemingly boundless references, broad vision, for introducing me to the oral history project in Ukraine, and for his laughter. I thank Professor Christi Merrill for challenging as well as reassuring me in reading and writing theory, for being interested in humor, and for being creative in not only the academic sphere. I thank Professor Joshua Miller for his kind and engaged reading, his comparative work, and his supportive advice. Professor Anita Norich has been a reliable and encouraging mentor from the start; I thank her for her careful reading and challenging comments, and for making Ann Arbor feel more like home. -
Making a Way out of No Way: Zora
ABSTRACT “‘Making a Way Out of No Way’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Hidden Discourse of Resistance” explores how Hurston used techniques she derived from the trickster tradition of African American folk culture in her narratives in order to resist and undermine the racism of the dominant discourse found in popular literature published during her lifetime. Critics have condemned her perceived willingness to use racist stereotypes in her work in order to pander to a white reading audience. This project asserts that Hurston did, indeed, don a “mask of minstrelsy” to play into her reading public’s often racist expectations in order to succeed as an academic and as a creative writer. At the same time, however, she crafted her narratives in a way that destabilized those expectations through use of sometimes subtle and sometimes blatant points of resistance. In this way, she was able to participate in a system that was rigged against her, as a woman and as an African American, by playing into the expectations of her audiences for economic and professional advantages while simultaneously undermining aspects of those expectations through rhetorical “winks,” exaggeration, sarcasm, and other forms of humor that enabled her to stay true to her personal values. While other scholars have examined Hurston’s discourse of resistance, this project takes a different approach by placing Hurston’s material in relation to the publishing climate at the time. Chapter One examines Mules and Men in the context of the revisions Hurston made to her scholarly work to transform her collection of folktales into a cohesive book marketed to a popular reading audience. -
Every Tongue Got to Confess
ZORA NEALE HURSTON Every Tongue Got to Confess Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States Foreword by John Edgar Wideman Edited and with an Introduction by Carla Kaplan Contents E-Book Extra The Oral Tradition: A Reading Group Guide Every Tongue Got to Confess Foreword by John Edgar Wideman Introduction by Carla Kaplan A Note to the Reader Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 “Stories Kossula Told Me” Acknowledgments About the Author Praise By Zora Neale Hurston Credits Copyright About the Publisher Acknowledgments The estate of Zora Neale Hurston is deeply grateful for the contributions of John Edgar Wideman and Dr. Carla Kaplan to this publishing event. We also thank our editor Julia Serebrinsky, our publisher Cathy Hemming, our agent Victoria Sanders, and our attorney Robert Youdelman who all work daily to support the literary legacy of Zora Neale Hurston. Lastly, we thank those whose efforts past and present have been a part of Zora Neale Hurston’s resurgence. Among them are: Robert Hemenway, Alice Walker, the folks at the MLA, Virginia Stanley, Jennifer Hart, Diane Burrowes and Susan Weinberg at HarperCollins Publishers, special friends of the estate Imani Wilson and Kristy Anderson, and all the teachers and librarians everywhere who introduce new readers to Zora every day. Foreword With the example of her vibrant, poetic style Zora Neale Hurston reminded me, instructed me that the language of fiction must never become inert, that the writer at his or her desk, page by page, line by line, word by word should animate the text, attempt to make it speak as the best storytellers speak. -
Reading “Black Love” Fall 2014 Lecture 35226R T/TH 11-12:20PM THH 215
ARLT 100g: Reading “Black Love” Fall 2014 Lecture 35226R T/TH 11-12:20PM THH 215 Professor: Lanita Jacobs Office: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) 356 Phone: 213-740-1909 Email: [email protected] Office Hours: T/TH 10-10:50AM; also by appt. You can also contact me Monday-Friday via email. Required Texts: 1. Gwaltney, John Langston. 1993. Drylongso: A Self Portrait of Black America. New York: The New Press. 2. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1990 [1935]. Mules and Men. New York: HarperCollins. 3. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1998 [1937]. Their Eyes Were Watching God; with a foreword by Mary Helen Washington. New York: HarperCollins. 4. Hurston, Zora Neale. 2006 [1943]. Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography. New York: Harper Perennial. Optional Texts: 5. Gregory, Dick. 1995 [1964]. Nigger: An Autobiography, with Robert Lipsyte. New York: Pocket Books. 6. Zinsser, William. 2001. On Writing Well (6th Edition). New York: HarperCollins Publishers. NOTE: All texts are on reserve in Leavey Library. Course Description: What is love, let alone “Black” love? Can love be qualified in relationship to race, gender, class, sexuality, etc. and their many intersections? What broader stakes (e.g., intellectual, personal, political) underlie the scholarly quest to understand “Black love”? This inaugural course interrogates these questions through a close and passionate reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s canonical texts, Mules and Men, Their Eyes Were Watching God (TEWWG), and Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography. At once known then lost in literary obscurity, Hurston was found again – first by African American author Alice Walker and later by Oprah Winfrey, who famously brought TEWWG to the big screen. -
Hurston, “Sweat” and Laundry Icons
In/visible Men 69 In/visible Men: Hurston, “Sweat” and Laundry Icons Barbara Ryan Man, don’t hang out that dirty washing in my back yard. The tale of Delia the washwoman is one of Zora Neale Hurston’s best known. It’s also been judged “by far the best of [her] early writings” and “arguably [her] finest short story.” As a result, “Sweat” (1926) has incited wide-ranging discus- sion. Not fully appreciated, though, is how teasingly it dances at the dizzy edge of dangerous wit. So dizzy is that edge that critics are still falling into a trap set by the laughing-up-her-sleeve satirist who remains half-known, only, to the academy. That was the risk run by an artist whose aesthetic merged anti-racist initiatives with ironization of figurations circulated so energetically, over so many years, that they signified as icons. With the passage of time, those icons’ disappearance has left even labor-alert readers likely to miss trenchant play in “Sweat.” I spotlight that play by tackling the misapprehension that the laundry Delia whitens laboriously symbolizes her “innate goodness.”1 That interpretation is short-sighted for two reasons. One, white laundry puns on the means by which she bought and keeps the house in which she invests so much (too much?) love. Two, goodness doesn’t mesh with her decision to say nothing when her unloved husband Sykes intrudes on a rattlesnake. The morality play enacted by her si- lence is honored by realization that “Sweat” blurs folkloric narrative methods 0026-3079/2010/5101/2-069$2.50/0 American Studies, 51:1/2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 69-88 69 70 Barbara Ryan into allegory.2 That’s a vital insight.