Sister Citizen

Zora Neale Hurston was criticized both by her contemporaries and by subsequent generations of scholars for being a romantic elitist disconnected from the substantive concerns of black Americans. Dismissed as disengaged storytelling in an era that produced serious political commentary about race, Hurston’s work was consigned to a footnote of the Harlem Renaissance. But if we read Hurston carefully, we find important political lessons embedded in the story of a black woman’s search for self. Throughout Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston reveals how the politics of race and gender intersect the challenges of self-exploration. Together these forces become a storm, a literal hurricane, in the life of Hurston’s main character, Janie Mae Crawford.