• DOI:10.1093/ALH/13.2.265
• Corpus ID: 145060987

"Go there tuh know there": Zora Neale Hurston and the Chronotope of the Folk

@article{Duck2001GoTT,
  title={"Go there tuh know there": Zora Neale Hurston and the Chronotope of the Folk},
  author={Leigh Anne Duck},
  journal={American Literary History},
  year={2001},
  volume={13},
  pages={265 - 294}
}

• Leigh Anne Duck
• Published 1 April 2001
• Art
• American Literary History

In his 1936 Opportunity review of Mules and Men (1935), Zora Neale Hurston's collection of southern African-American folklore and hoodoo practices, Alain Locke raises a concern still prevalent in the criticism of her work. Praising her knowledge of the "rare native material and local color," he nonetheless com- plains that the locale, as she presents it, is "too Arcadian," even "extinct" ("Deep River" 9). An influential and prolific critic, Locke called often for the artistic representation of "folk tradi- tions" and the "folk-spirit," which he viewed as the "deep re- sources of the past." 1 Hurston's work violated this dictum, how- ever, by suggesting that the "folk" existed not only in history and in the realm of the aesthetic, but also in the present and in the social space of the southeastern US. For this reason, the critical reception of her work exemplifies the challenge of contemporary African-American vernacular theory, which, in configuring the historical rural South as a space of cultural heritage and authen- ticity, often struggles to negotiate its relationship to the modern- izing nation (Dubey; Favor 5-9). Though she is generally cele- brated as an artist whose work resisted racism by emphasizing the holistic, communal values of traditional African-American culture, she has also been widely dismissed as a writer whose representations of the "folk" accommodated the racism of a na- tion quick to exploit "undeveloped" peoples. Despite their diver- gent political and aesthetic positions, these readings tend to share the premise that the worlds inscribed in her work must be mapped outside of national modernity, and mapped, instead, in a space characterized as "mythic," "spiritual," "nostalgic," or "anti-historical" (Wall, "Mules" 667; Baker 300-05; Carby 174; Gilroy 91). This essay seeks to intervene in this debate by considering the difficulty Hurston faced as a writer who endeavored to map