Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life (Critical Perspectives on the Past Series) - Hardcover

Patterson, Tiffany Ruby

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9781592132898: Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life (Critical Perspectives on the Past Series)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1592132898 ISBN 13: 9781592132898

Publisher: Temple University Press,U.S., 2005

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Uses the ethnographic and literary work of Hurston to augment the few official documents and family records to reconstruct the social world of all-black towns

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Review:

"Enthusiasts for the work of Zora Neale Hurston will not be disappointed in Tiffany Ruby Patterson's excellent study of Hurston's work.... her precise recasting of history through the eyes of one of our most careful observers is a book that never fails to inform or delight.... This is a valuable and long-overdue addition to scholarship on Hurston and black life in the South."-Black Issues Book Review "Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life is a blockbuster book which gracefully and convincingly challenges established views of Hurston and her region. Especially impressive is the placing of Hurston's life, fiction, and folklore within the history of all-black towns, maroon societies, and nationalist traditions. Patterson portrays a cultural naturalism not obsessed with whites at every turn, and expressive of both love and gender conflict, unity and class/color tension. This book's achievement far transcends the recovery of new sources and hinges on an ability to deploy those sources in a way that makes new our understanding of Hurston, and of the early twentieth century rural south."-David Roediger, University of Illinois, and author of Working Toward Whiteness "In this smart, well-written study of the brilliant, free-spirited writer of Harlem Renaissance renown, Zora Neale Huston, historian Tiffany Patterson deepens our understanding of the, often unexplored, interior lives and culture of residents of early 20th century southern black communities. This is a gem of a book! Tiffany Patterson adroitly captures and illuminates the fascinating complexity of Hurston and the places she represented, inhabited, and imagined."-Darlene Clark Hine, editor, Black Women in America 3 Volumes, Revised and Expanded Edition

Synopsis:

A historian hoping to reconstruct the social world of all-black towns or the segregated black sections of other towns in the South finds only scant traces of their existence. In [title] Tiffany Ruby Patterson uses the ethnographic and literary work of Zora Neale Hurston to augment the few official documents, newspaper accounts, and family records that pertain to these places hidden from history. Hurston's ethnographies, plays, and fiction focused on the day-to-day life in all-black social spaces as well as "the Negro farthest down" in labor camps. Patterson shows how Hurston's work coincides with the fragmented historical record to demonstrate the extent to which the folklore and stories provide a plausible account of these Black folk as active human subjects, shaped by history and shaping their private world. Beyond the view and domination of whites in these spaces, they created their own codes of social behavior, honor, and justice. In Patterson's view Hurston did not demean her subjects or caricature them; she rendered them faithfully and with respect for their individuality and endurance.

In so doing, she enabled us to envision a world that otherwise would have been inaccessible.

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