![]() ![]() In Eatonville she could freely express herself as an individual but not in Jacksonville. This experience and others like it showed her that racial judgments are emotionally irrational, that culture is something geographically relative because she only experienced herself as “colored” when moving to a racially mixed city. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown-warranted not to rub nor run.” This disturbance of moving from an all-black town to a multi-ethnic city had a profound effect on her conception of race and culture, the effect of which may be why she wanted to study anthropology and African folklore, which could also enhance her growing interest in literature. In her 1928 essay, “How it Feels to be Colored Me,” she explains how this transition felt: “I was not Zora of any more, I was now a little colored girl. Her literary education began after northern schoolteachers visited their town and handed out books. The town offered the unique advantage as an escape from white society in the Jim Crow South. A few years later, her father became mayor. Born in Alabama, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida-one of the first all-black incorporated towns and setting of her magnus opus, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a text so canonical that it inspired part of Beyoncé’s Lemonade -in 1894. ![]() ![]() Zora Neale Hurston’s life before entering university in 1918 at the age of twenty-seven is story unto itself. Below is an essay I wrote after Barracoon ’s publication, which tells the story of how Zora Neale Hurston, who was always sidelined during her career as a black female writer, had developed her unique writing style from her times as an anthropologist interviewing black communities in the South. The best example of this is Barracoon, the book Hurston wrote based on her interviews with Lewis, which publishers refused to publish because of its violent recounting of a West African kingdom enslaving other West Africans.īarracoon was finally published in 2018, which importantly solidified both Hurston and Lewis’s contribution to American and West African history. īut far from being a complete form of revisionism, The Woman King directly confronts the issue of West African involvement in the slave trade, which black writers and artists in the USA during the Harlem Renaissance deliberately suppressed. This happened three decades after the events portrayed in The Woman King. The Woman King is about an all-female military unit of the Dahomey Kingdom in the eighteen-twenties that realize their participation in the salve trade is evil and should replace it with palm oil.Ĭontrary to the forgivable historical sleight-of-hand the film employs, Cudjo Lewis recounts his story, in two interviews with Hurston in 1927, about an all-female unit of the Dahomey Kingdom that slaughtered his entire village and sold its stronger members into slavery. in physics.With the recent release of The Woman King, I decided to revive my essay on Zora Neale Hurston’s experience with interviewing Cudjo Lewis, who was on the final slave ship that landed in the USA in 1860. He followed his interests in his college and graduate studies, focusing primarily on the natural sciences and geography while attending the University of Heidelberg, the University of Bonn, and the University of Kiel, where he graduated with a Ph.D. From a young age, Boas was taught to value books and became interested in the natural sciences and culture. His family was Jewish but identified with liberal ideologies and encouraged independent thinking. His theory of cultural relativism held that all cultures were equal, but simply had to be understood in their own contexts and by their own terms.īoas was born in 1858 in Minden, in the German province of Westphalia. Interesting Facts: Boas was an outspoken opponent of racism, and used anthropology to refute the scientific racism that was popular during his time.Notable Publications: "The Mind of Primitive Man" (1911), "Handbook of American Indian Languages" (1911), "Anthropology and Modern Life" (1928), " Race, Language, and Culture" (1940).Education: University of Heidelberg, University of Bonn, University of Kiel.Known For: Considered the "Father of American Anthropology". ![]()
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