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Books by Zora Neale
Hurston
Their Eyes Were
Watching God /
Mules and Men
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Jonah’s Gourd Vine
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Tell
My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
Zora Neale Hurston : Novels and Stories
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Dust
Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography
Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond
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Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora
Neale Hurston
By Anthea Kraut
University of
Minnesota Press, Paperback, $25. 320 pages, illustrated
Book Review by
Kam Williams
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Although I studied ballet and modern from an
early age, jazz dance was my greatest
love... In these predominantly white spaces,
no mention was made of the African-American
origins of the idiom… It was not until my
junior year at Carleton College… that I
confronted the racial dynamics that went
unspoken in those suburban jazz dance
classes… It became clear just how much jazz
dance, that quintessentially American form,
owed to African-derived traditions… Why had
it been so easy to participate in and become
passionate about a dance form without
learning its history?
As I
continued my study of American dance history
in graduate school at Northwestern, my
interest in ‘invisibilized’ histories only
deepened. I learned that Zora Neale Hurston
had staged a concert with a spectacular
Bahamian dance finale about which little was
known. What began as a quest for information
about Hurston’s theatrical revues gradually
expanded as I uncovered connections between
Hurston and a number of leading dance
figures.
To a
great extent, the recovery project also
became a case study of invisibilization—an
attempt to understand the conditions that
enable certain subjects and performances to
be forgotten—as well as an inquiry into the
implications of restoring those subjects and
performances to the historical record. . . .
. For Hurston’s stage work . . . did play a
role in the composition of American dance as
we know it today.—Excerpted
from the Preface (pages ix-x)
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Most people think of Zora Neale
Hurston (1891-1960) as a leading figure in the Harlem
Renaissance, a literary icon fondly remembered as the
author of the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
However, many forget that she was also a gifted
choreographer whose innovative productions helped
transform the landscape of modern dance. Sadly, due to
racism, she never received the credit she deserved for
her contributions to this then emerging field.
The disrespect she was shown was
very similar to the way in which African-American jazz
artists were denigrated in their day, while many of the
white imitators who arrived in their wake, such as the
Gershwins and Tommy Dorsey, were celebrated as cultural
geniuses. While seminal jazz greats like Satchmo,
Fletcher Henderson, and Duke Ellington may have
belatedly gotten their due, the same can’t be said for
dance where Hurston’s name is still never mentioned in
the same breath as the Caucasians generally credited
with accelerating the acceptance of modern dance during
the period between the two world wars.
Now, thanks to Anthea Kraut, author
of Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of
Zora Neale Hurston, the slight has finally been
rectified. For the detail-oriented Professor Kraut, who
teaches dance at the University of California –
Riverside, goes to great pains, here, to re-authenticate
Hurston’s scores and theatrical stagings, while
simultaneously raising suspicions about some of her
competitors who undoubtedly benefited from their lack of
melanin.
A choreographic legacy restored!
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Choreographing the Folk
The Dance Stagings of Zora
Neale Hurston
By Anthea Kraut
While Zora Neale
Hurston and her 1937 novel
Their Eyes Were
Watching God
have become widely celebrated, she was also a
prolific stage director and choreographer. In the 1930s
Hurston produced theatrical concerts that depicted a day
in the life of a railroad work camp in Florida and
featured a rousing Bahamian Fire Dance as the dramatic
finale. In Choreographing the Folk, Anthea Kraut traces
the significance and influence of Hurston’s little-known
choreographic work. Hurston’s concerts were concrete
illustrations of the “real Negro art theatre” she was
eager to establish, and they compellingly demonstrate
how she used the arena of performance to advance a
nuanced understanding of the black diaspora.
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Her version of the
Fire Dance was staged in a variety of venues during the
1930s. In its multiple representations, Kraut asserts,
the dance raised critical issues about ownership,
artistry, and authenticity. Choreographing the Folk
argues for the significance of Hurston’s
choreography, and with perceptiveness, sensitivity, and
originality, Kraut illuminates the important and
often-contested place of black folk dance in American
culture.—amazon.com
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Zora
Neale Hurston, folklorist and writer, became a central
figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was born and educated
in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black city in the
United States. At the age of 16, she left her home to work with
a traveling theatrical company. The company ended up in New York
City , where Hurston studied anthropology at Columbia
University. She then attended Howard University as well as
Barnard College.
In
1931, Hurston collaborated with Langston Hughes to write the
play
Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts. She
wrote her most acclaimed work,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
in 1937. After writing her autobiography (Dust Tracks on a
Road) in 1942, she went on to teach at what is now North
Carolina Central University. Her work, revived by feminists in
the 1970s, has gained her considerable recognition as one of the
most important black writers in American history.
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Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography
By Robert E. Hemenway (Author) / Foreword
by Alice Walker
Zora
Neale Hurston—novelist, folklorist,
anthropologist, and child of the rural black
South—transformed each hour of her life into
something bubbling, exuberant, and brimming
with her joy in just being. Robert Hemenway
captures the effervescence of this daughter
of the Harlem Renaissance in his brilliant
and original literary biography. He provides
for the first time a full length study of
Hurston's life and art, using unpublished
letters and manuscripts and personal
interviews with many who knew her.
His
sensitive reconstruction of Miss Hurston's
life details her two marriages, her
relations with her patron, Mrs. R. Osgood
Mason, her mentor, Franz Boas, and her
friend Langston Hughes; her indictment on a
morals charge in 1948; and the sad, final
years leading to her death as a penniless
occupant of a Florida welfare home. But most
important, his interpretation of her art and
scholarship, including her extraordinary
novels, autobiography, and popular treatment
of black folkways, underscores her deep and
abiding commitment to the black folk
tradition.
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Ida Cox (February 25, 1896 –
November 10, 1967) was an
African American
singer and
vaudeville performer, best known for her
blues performances and
recordings. She was billed as "The
Uncrowned Queen of the Blues" Cox was born
in February, 1896 as Ida Prather in
Toccoa,
Habersham County, Georgia (Toccoa was in
Habersham County, not yet
Stephens County at the time), the
daughter of Lamax and Susie (Knight)
Prather, and grew up in
Cedartown, Georgia, singing in the local
African
Methodist Church
choir.
She
left home to tour with travelling
minstrel shows, often appearing in
blackface into the 1910s; she married
fellow minstrel performer Adler Cox. By
1920, she was appearing as a headline act at
the 81 Theatre in
Atlanta, Georgia; another headliner at
that time was
Jelly Roll Morton. . . .—Wikipedia
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Ida Cox—Wild Women Don’t Have
the Blues
Wild Women
Don’t Have the Blues
By
Ida Cox
I hear these women raving 'bout their monkey
men
About their trifling husbands and their no
good friends
These poor women sit around all day and moan
Wondering why their wandering papa's don't
come home
But wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have no blues
Now when you've got a man, don't never be on
the square
'Cause if you do he'll have a woman
everywhere
I never was known to treat no one man right
I keep 'em working hard both day and night
'Cause wild women don't worry, wild women
don't have their blues
I've got a disposition and a way of my own
When my man starts kicking I let him find
another home
I get full of good liquor, walk the streets
all night
Go home and put my man out if he don't act
right
Wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have their blues
You never get nothing by being an angel
child
You better change your ways and get real
wild
I wanna tell you something, I wouldn't tell
you a lie
Wild women are the only kind that ever get
by
wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have their blues. |
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Video: "South Side Story"
—Ta-Nehisi
Coates author of
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to
Manhood
discusses Michelle Obama with Paul Coates an outspoken publisher
and former Black Panther—his father.
When Michelle Obama told a
Milwaukee campaign rally last February, "For the first time in
my adult life, I am proud of my country," critics derided her as
another Angry Black Woman. But the only truly radical
proposition put forth by Obama, born and raised in Chicago's
storied South Side, is the idea of a black community fully
vested in the country at large, and proud of the American dream. —“American Girl" (Ta Nehesi Coates)* * *
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The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's
wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in
1937, after her cousin was falsely accused
of stealing a white man's turkeys and was
almost beaten to death. In 1945, George
Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled
Florida for Harlem after learning of the
grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie
party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing
Foster made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for the
United States Army and couldn't operate in
his own home town." Anchored to these three
stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively
researched study of the "great migration,"
the exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates
sociological and historical studies into the
novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling,
and Pershing settling in new lands, building
anew, and often finding that they have not
left racism behind. The drama, poignancy,
and romance of a classic immigrant saga
pervade this book, hold the reader in its
grasp, and resonate long after the reading
is done. |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Black World
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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