'A whirlwind among breezes' : Zora Neale Hurston and the new negro movement

Abstract

This dissertation aims to determine whether a relation exists between Zora Neale Hurston?s fiction and the ideology of the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. The first chapter provides an overview of the Movement and the artistic thrust that emerged as a result ? a period of creativity among African Americans known as the Harlem Renaissance. Prominent members of both the artistic and political movements include Alain Locke, W.E.B Du Bois, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes. Hurston, too, has been grouped among New Negro artists, however, the chronological and ideological discrepancies that exist between her writing and that of the Movement serve to create a rift between Hurston and her contemporaries. The second chapter will explore how Hurston?s belief in the importance of individual identity unfailingly supersedes her faith in collectivism, particularly race solidarity. Her novels, Jonah?s Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Moses, Man of the Mountain and Seraph on the Suwanee, illustrate her distinctive focus on individual fulfillment. The fact that Hurston refrained from publishing her novels during the Harlem Renaissance, and, more importantly, that she refused to foreground topics such as racism and race achievement, will be seen as factors which distance her from the New Negro Movement. Furthermore, Hurston?s choice of setting and language may be seen as symbols of her renouncement of the Movement?s desire to promote a more ?civilised? image of the African American. Close reading of Hurston?s fiction, however, reveals that she was very much in tune with the concerns of New Negro activists, namely the effects of poverty, slavery, racial discrimination, Jim Crow legislation and violence on the African American nation. The third chap differing from the typical propagandist works of the New Negro Movement, are perhaps not as naïve as earlier critics of her work have considered them. The discrepancy between Hurston?s essays and autobiography, both of which consciously undermine racial politics, and her fiction, which conversely shows her acute awareness of political issues, remains a cause of great debate. This selfcontradictive tendency, together with her unshakeable passion for individual freedom, makes it difficult to categorise Hurston within a movement whose emphasis lay on race solidarity. Hurston, however, may easily be placed beside countless American writers, both black and white, who embody the unyielding belief in individual liberty and equality that America continues to represent.