While celebrating Frantz Fanon’s ninety-fifth birthday, Deivison Mendes Faustino, Professor at the Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil, wrote the following statement:
The colonised world is a world cut in two. In capitalist countries, between the exploited and power, there is a multitude of moral teachers, counsellors, ‘disorienters’. In colonial regions, on the other hand . . . the intermediary of power uses a language of pure violence . . . he does not alleviate the oppression, he does not disguise the domination. He exposes them, he manifests them with the calm awareness of the forces of order . . . he brings violence into the homes and into the brains of the colonised . . . The originality of the colonial context is that the economic realities, the inequalities, the enormous difference in ways of life can never mask the human realities. (Faustino 2020: 2; our translation)
From this critical point of view, the historical narrative presents dramatic scenes: the colonial world is a world divided, ‘cut in half’ (Fanon 1962); on the one hand, we have a society mediated by the oppressive regime of pure violence, containing soldiers and police; and on the other hand, the city of the colonised is a city of bad reputation, of hunger, an obscure city. Therefore, the use of violence begins, firstly, by the consumption of everything that comes from the coloniser as good; secondly, we see a clear dependence on the values of the settler’s world, that is, the settler is not seen in the foreground as an enemy.
Coloniality can be traced geographically, and in the last few decades the idea of a colonised ‘Global South’ and a ‘Global North’ coloniser has emerged (Dados and Connell 2012), showing a shift from a focus on cultural differences to an interest in geopolitical disparities. There is growing criticism of the validity of excluding empires like China or Russia from the categorisation of the Global North (Serrano-Muñoz 2021). However, regarding the frame of this analysis, it is still useful to represent the Global North as Western countries, primarily in Europe and North America, viewing the Global South and the rest of the world with a focus on the Americas – including the Caribbean region – and Africa in its full heterogeneity. This analytical separation helps us to describe not only the colonial and capitalistic production of basic goods in the world system (Quijano 2000), but also the production of knowledge and life perspectives. How are science, knowledge and tradition produced in the Global South? And how are they performed in the complex, multi-dimensional peripheries of the Global North?
If we connect the standpoint of this world view to the narrative of Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, in his work Leaving the Great Night: Essay on Decolonized Africa (2010), we see a few key points of convergence between a structural domination of a colonial nature and the stories of diasporic communities and subjects treated in this book, highlighting a female Black anthropologist’s trajectory.
Mbembe starts by describing the path of his life back to his country of origin, Cameroon, in Central Africa, and continues seeking and weaving memories of his daily life during childhood and adolescence. Kossula, a West African storyteller in diaspora portrayed by Zora Neale Hurston, starts his narrative from an African origin, and continues it by helping to build Africatown, a rural self-sufficient community settled in the Southern United States. And finally, Hurston, the protagonist of this book and a key figure in many of the contemporary narratives helping to rebuild anthropology through a diasporic, decolonising lens, starts her itinerary in a small rural village in the Southern United States and comes back to the same region after a few decades of academic education, artistic creation, political activities and extensive fieldwork in Black geographies.
In this book, we also seek to offer a fresh perspective on Zora Neale Hurston’s life by examining her through an anthropological lens, a perspective that has often been overlooked in previous biographies. Jennifer Freeman Marshall, a professor with a PhD in Women’s Studies from Emory University who currently teaches at Purdue University, reflects on this in her recent book Ain’t I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston beyond the Literary Icon (2023).
As Marshall notes, Hurston’s work has been met with ‘twice as much praise or twice as much blame’, a pattern that has characterised the critical reception of her work in US academia since the 1970s. Marshall observes, ‘readers might be surprised to find that while Hurston has been widely celebrated as a literary artist, her reception within American anthropology presents a far more complex story’ (2023: 17). It is worth noting that, despite her background in literary studies, Marshall’s work also highlights the need for an interdisciplinary approach to Hurston’s legacy.
This is how we propose to read the life and itineraries of cultural anthropologist, ethnographer, folklorist and Afro-American writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) through the perspective of a continuous movement presented in several dimensions – subjective, sociocultural and ancestral – evidencing the rhythm of diasporas in her life, work and further impact on arts, civil rights movements and the academy.
In a journey that is not so far from Hurston’s experience, we read again the narratives of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009, 2013), who, as a Black African woman in diaspora in the twenty-first century to the United States, faced permanent racial issues and other hardships in her life as an immigrant. As a contemporary Anglophone writer, she has used autobiographical observations intertwined with fictional characters and situations to talk sensitively about issues such as colour prejudice, gender inequality and womanhood. Adichie has told her stories from a diasporic perception, celebrating her country and continent’s culture and heritage.
In the same tone, we will explore key aspects of the prolific life and oeuvre of Zora Neale Hurston, an author who has been increasingly recognised within anthropology as a ‘new classic’ of the field, facing decades of institutional silence and bringing to the present discussion many important contributions to anthropology and cultural studies, as highlighted by Maria Eugenia Cotera (2008), Messias Basques (2019a; 2019b), and Telma de Sousa Bemerguy (2021).
Literature and culture in general received Hurston some decades previously, especially since Alice Walker’s (1975) essay, a text we will also explore in this book. We would like to highlight two contributions. First, we will look at Wrapped in Rainbows by biographer and Black author Valerie Boyd (2003), who wrote a powerful portrait of Hurston’s life and oeuvre from a journalistic perspective. Second, we will explore the monumental book by Carla Kaplan (2002), who put together, transcribed and carefully commented on a large amount of Hurston’s manuscripts and typewritten letters, as well as creative sketches. We will also dive into Maria Cotera’s Native Speakers (2009) and Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air (2019), monographs that focus on Zora Neale Hurston’s life intertwined with other intellectuals of her time.
We do not pretend to be exhaustive. By writing an anthropological essay in close dialogue with literary speculation, we feel and think of not only the futures, but also of alternative presents that have been rendered invisible by more privileged positions in knowledge production (Haraway 2016; Todd 2016). At the same time, by choosing to tell Hurston’s life story and to describe her oeuvre from a diasporic perspective, we are driven by four basic questions:
By bringing up these questions, our aim is to make Zora Neale Hurston more accessible to different anthropologists and anthropological perspectives that are emerging around the world, especially in different worlds that have been colonised, exhausted and deprived of the potency to produce their own frames of knowledge and experience. We intend to continue our conversation with anthropologists and their institutions in the Global North, but we want this discussion to critically and openly include the realities of anthropologists who are producing their perspectives within ongoing wars, pervasive violence, structural neglect, precarious institutional structures and a series of other necropolitical landscapes (Mbembe 2010, 2019) intertwined in the pervasive structure of racial patriarchy (Schloesser 2002; Kilomba 2019).
The political theorist Pauline E. Schloesser defines racial patriarchy in the following words:
[it] is a pecking order among persons that . . . differs from ‘patriarchy’, in that it takes into account race as well as gender as organizing principles. It developed through ideas, institutions, and social practices. In terms of ideas, racial patriarchy developed from a convergence of human agreements on white supremacy and male supremacy that privileged white males, especially those with property, above everyone else . . . They are cultural myths that operated in their own day and to some extent in our own day to persuade persons to accept their prescribed places. (Schloesser 2002: 12)
And how can racial patriarchy be read from a biographical account? We would like to suggest that Zora Neale Hurston, a Black North American woman, ‘genius of the South’, as Alice Walker (1975) called her, belongs to a global, colonial and diasporic space that was not limited to the contours of the modern nation state. In fact, she was born in the Southern United States, but this should not be enough to describe her. In this sense, we would like to expand the space that corresponds to this North American ‘South’ pointed out by Walker beyond national borders and bring into dialogue other points linked to the geopolitical configuration of global Southern subalternity. And that is why, from an intercultural, intersectional, decolonising and popular perspective, we would like to embrace Zora Neale Hurston’s contribution as the work of a ‘genius of the Global South’, connecting her heritage to the struggles of decolonising intellectuals and political activists from the South. We open this conversation including Hurston as a strategic piece in a necessary shift in anthropological science, a movement that is already bringing other voices to the core of its canon, opening other possibilities from a more inclusive, historically responsible and varied disciplinary foundation.
Anyone who writes does it from a particular place, specific realities and distinct historical and sociocultural experiences. Grada Kilomba (2019), a Portuguese multidisciplinary artist, has criticised the discourse of objective or universal neutrality in the production of knowledge, showing us the importance of building social sciences from located perspectives.
As a core part of our epistemological and methodological approach, we consider the importance of our own position towards the production of knowledge. In consequence, we would like to briefly introduce our backgrounds and to frame this not only as a biographical note, but as a reflexive statement intertwined with the decisions taken and the perspectives that arose during the writing process.
Peti Mama Gomes is a Black woman of Mandjaku ethnicity, born in Guinea-Bissau, more precisely in the region of Cacheu, in the Canchungo sector. She identifies herself as an African Black feminist, Guinean activist and anthropologist. Her academic background in human and social sciences was developed in Brazil, a country that provoked her to think about and bring together diverse experiences of women in what is called the Global South. Since her graduation in Guinea-Bissau, she has dedicated her study and her research to themes that permeate the perception of political anthropology and gender from an assumedly African perspective. On the other hand, she has written on and researched topics related to the African diaspora and South–South political and epistemological connections.
Ana Gretel Echazú Böschemeier is an Argentinian-Brazilian anthropologist. She was born in the Andean region of north-western Argentina and raised in a migrant-working-class family in the mild climate valleys of the Atacama region, very close to the Chilean and Bolivian borders. In between her rural uprising identity, she has been racialised as white in most Latin American and African contexts – and through processes of self-observation, self-education and peer-to-peer education, she acknowledges this as an indelible privilege stamped onto her identity.
She graduated in Anthropology at the National University of Salta (Argentina) and did her master’s, doctoral and postdoctoral studies in Brazil. She researches subjects linked to gender, health, ethics, human rights, decoloniality and theoretical-methodological critiques of the anthropological canon. At the time of writing this book, she is an assistant professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), and is dedicated to teaching, researching and driving community projects related to plural expressions of feminism in the Global South, racial and ethnic issues, cultural translation and ethics in research.
Peti Mama and Ana Gretel met in 2019 at the Seventh Anthropology Week at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. Since then, they have worked together in a project linked to the UNESCO Chair on Higher Education and Indigenous–Afro-descendant People in Latin America, launched by the Tres de Febrero National University (Argentina). This project focuses on transversal virtual engagement towards facing epistemic racism in several universities (UFRN, UNILAB, UFBA, UFCG) and communities from north-eastern Brazil, as well as through other mutual collaborations related to cultural translation, epistemologies, decoloniality and plural feminisms, and the encounter of knowledge (Carvalho 2018).
The position from which we describe Zora Neale Hurston questions any other folklorisation of her life and work. Coming from folklorised geographies – Western Africa and Andean South America – we found ourselves defining our positions as subjects of knowledge against simple interpretations, cultural clichés and overgeneralisations in both our professional paths. This has been an important part of our métier, as we identify with the marginal status of the author we write about. We write from a position of learned otherness and discomfort coming from our experiences of migration and displacement. Both of us are intellectual migrants who came to Brazil looking for an expansion of our professional paths in anthropology and gender studies.
At the same time, during the process of writing this monograph, both of us acknowledged in a more explicit way that we were doing this from two different positions that are permeated by the ethno-racial and national differences embodied by each of us. We created a space in order to take those differences as a stimulating counterpoint for dialogue, understanding that, in the epistemic-political work of fortifying spaces of allyship (Tatum 2007; Coleman-King, Anderson and Koerber 2021), it is vital to acknowledge differences and inequalities of both our personal histories and the histories of our ancestors.
At the same time, research work in the history of anthropology like that developed here involves careful attention, compromise and the down-to-earth perception to understand that this is not, in any possible way, a last or better version than others. Embracing the risks of this open dialogue for growth, we understand this work as a contribution to a plural, polysemic reappropriation of Zora Neale Hurston not only in the Global South, but also in research discussions in the Global North.
One important experience in the definition of our genealogical, diasporic proposal to study the work and life of Zora Neale Hurston was the continued work at the RECânone community project (UFRN/UNILAB) during 2019–22. During discussions about fiction, ethnography and literature, we acknowledged that Hurston’s work in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States provided historical density to the meaning of intersectionality, a concept that has been fervently discussed in the Brazilian academy and the Black movement in a dynamic of educating academia and public policies (Gomes 2017; Echazú Böschemeier and Gomes Santos 2020) during the last decade.
The testimony, the anthropological fieldwork and also the speculative fiction written by a Black woman in anthropology in the 1930s, affected by racism, machoism, classism and regional segregation, was for us a work of unrivalled intensity, and we envisioned the place of an emerging authorship that was starting to be recognised by Brazilian anthropology at the time (Basques 2019a). Towards a discussion located not only in the Brazilian context, but also in the wider territories of the Africas, Latin America and the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993), we started bringing together a more articulated understanding of the discussions brought forward by Hurston in the context of the epistemology of the social sciences and humanities from the Global South.
During the development of the RECânone project, around fifteen texts by and about Zora Neale Hurston were discussed, translated, commented on and illustrated. This took place during collective conversations about identities, coloniality of knowledge and the demands of Black and Indigenous students at our universities for the transformation of our curriculums into more representative bodies of knowledge. Not only Hurston’s texts, but also the unique essay ‘In Search of Zora Neale Hurston’ (Walker 1975), as well as the contemporary portrait of Hurston in the second chapter of the book Native Speakers, written by Maria Eugenia Cotera (2008), were provided by their authors and translated.
The compromised task of the translator (Benjamin 1999), as well as authority and power impacting matters of cultural translation (Asad 1996), the tricky dynamics of thick translation (Appiah 2000) and the emergence of a body of thought about feminist translations in Latin America (Carvalho Fonseca et al. 2020) were discussed as theoretical-methodological approaches complementary to our métier. As a result, we had a collective publication in an academic journal (Erickson and Echazú Böschemeier 2021), in a process that involved the experience of professionals from the field of English literature, including Dr Sandra Erickson, historians like Dr Natalia Cabanillas, and graduate students from the areas of social sciences, education and visual arts.
In this sense, the task of reconstructing Hurston’s intellectual genealogy echoed with a more horizontal way of approaching the translation process: the footnotes, the glossaries, the selected phrases, the graphs, the cordéis (traditional oral literary expression from north-eastern Brazil), the drawings, the collages, the recipes transformed into food and even the very emails requesting authorisation to translate the texts were constituted as a set of attached collective records, all of them set as interlocutors of the original documents that were being translated.
In this sense, the chosen texts, translated and commented on in the special issue about Zora Neale Hurston published in the Ayé Anthropological Journal, constituted the web of the references for a different realm where we aimed to locate Hurston’s diasporic production (Erickson and Echazú Böschemeier 2021). The publication of this compilation received positive feedback from active intellectuals such as Messias Basques, Rolena Adorno, Breny Mendoza, Sandra Harding, Maria Cotera and Alice Walker. In a movement that went outside Brazilian borders, we were invited by Professor Aleksandar Bošković to prepare and publish this biography, for the Berghahn Books series ‘Anthropology’s Ancestors’.
It is important to note that works bringing up the connection of Zora Neale Hurston with Afro-Brazilian intellectuals such as Beatriz Nascimento and Lélia Gonzalez are enriching the anthropological landscape of perceptions about memory, diasporas, belonging and the agency of Black women. A few works have been written as of now (Basques 2019a; Costa Cruz and Rodrigues 2021), but they are written in Portuguese and are discussed mainly inside the regional frontiers of the Global South.
A particular resonance can be seen in the work of Afro-Brazilian historian Beatriz Nascimento, especially in her article ‘Kilombo e Memória Comunitária’ (1982), in her posthumous book compilation Eu Sou Atlântica (Nascimento and Ratts 2006) and also in the documentary ‘Ôrí’ (1989), directed by Raquel Gerber, of which Nascimento is screenwriter and narrator. In her works, Nascimento analyses quilombos as spaces of Black resistance and identity construction, emphasising orality as a fundamental means of preserving African memory. These perspectives engage in dialogue with Hurston’s research on African American and Caribbean communities, highlighting the role of oral narratives in affirming the history and culture of the African diaspora.
‘The quilombo is a form of spatial, political, and economic organization that is structured as an alternative to freedom, recreating African memory in American territory’, highlights Nascimento (in Nascimento and Ratts, 2006: 227; our translation). Black culture is not static but is constantly recreated within its diaspora – thus, just as Hurston investigated African American and Caribbean traditions to demonstrate the continuity of African cultural values, Beatriz Nascimento analyses quilombos as spaces of Black identity reinvention, where African practices are reinterpreted in new contexts. Both contest the idea that the diaspora of African descent is merely a process of loss, instead highlighting autonomy, agency and the creation of self-determined spaces in different latitudes of the globe.
By pointing out some of the challenges of this task – such as our representativity as authors to embrace a comprehensive account about a person – and personality – from the United States – and also by positioning some of the inter-ethnic, international and inter-epistemic particularities of our mutual dialogue and trajectories as women, anthropologists and biographers, we accepted the challenge. This proposal resulted in an alignment with an understanding of gender and anthropology from a perspective that is critical of the coloniality of knowledge and power.
Our experiences moved us towards the emergence of other poles of knowledge production that existed for centuries and are not centred in the Anglo-Saxon world. In this movement, we aim to recognise the potencies of names and characters that have suffered – and still suffer – from academic epistemicide (Carneiro 2005). Although the book was a collective endeavour, some chapters were written by one of us, and shared with the other one to read, make comments and suggest additions or adjustments. Other parts were built together with an online writing tool, according to a timeline. All the parts authored by Peti Mama were written in Portuguese, as the general translation duties for the monograph were undertaken by Ana Gretel. By diving into the sense of what an ‘ancestor’ looks like and means to contemporary anthropology, we went through an against-the-grain critique of the history of anthropology’s ancestors (Eriksen and Nielsen 2001), as well as gaining perspective on how a classic is defined, why should we read them (Calvino 1993) and what the process has been of making the classics in the literary and contemporary canon of the humanities (Mukherjee 2010; Echazú Böschemeier 2019).
Complementarily, the idea of ‘ancestrality’ used in this monograph differs from the concept of ‘ancestry’, widely used in anthropology, as well as in the field of population genetics. While ‘ancestry’ refers, more descriptively, to the ethnic descent of a person or group, ‘ancestrality’ is a concept from discussions of African and Afro-diasporic philosophers and anthropologists such as Julio Braga (1992) and Eduardo Oliveira (2007).
‘Ancestrality’ – translated as ancestralidade in Portuguese and ancestralidad in Spanish – is defined as an intersubjectively formed sense of belonging, ‘compounding bodies here and now, through words and silences’ (Machado de Oliveira 2020: 24). In this sense, ‘ancestrality’ is an idea that emerges from the field of African and Latin American studies of ethnic memoirs. As defined by Eduardo Oliveira:
It has its unique components in myth, in rites, and in the body. Its challenge is the construction of worlds. Its horizon is the critique of dogmatically universalising philosophy, and its starting point is the philosophy of context. It aims to produce enchantment rather than concepts, changing the perspective of philosophising. It aims to live with paradoxes rather than resolve them. It is more propositional than analytical. It is singular, while it claims its right to planetary dialogue. It speaks from a cultural perspective, but is not reduced to it. The concept of ancestrality is evoked far beyond consanguineous relationships or symbolic kinship. Ancestry here is an analytical category that has contributed to the production of meaning, and of an ethical experience. It moves from a native category . . . to an analytical category, as developed by a recent African-based cultural philosophy. (2012; 30; our translation)
The theoretical-methodological tools of decoloniality (Mendoza 2019) have allowed us to question, from various points of view, the solidity of the canon (Mignolo 1991), and especially the anthropological canon (Echazú Böschemeier et al. 2017, 2020; Echazú Böschemeier 2019). This anthropological analysis requires it to be framed in the context of colonial and, especially, post-colonial territories, whose projects and institutions maintained an evident relationship, sometimes to evangelise, civilise or convert, something to know in order to dominate, and sometimes through outright opposition (Gomes 2022).
Thus, through the cultural translation of subalternate voices (Spivak 1988; Bhabha 2004) we strengthen the dialogue between epistemologies coming from South–South spaces (Mohanty 1984). In the transits ‘between worlds’ (Lugones 2003) of intercultural and dense translation it is possible to go through several dialogues between cultures, groups and identities in continuous transformation, interweaving and horizontalising perceptions of different ways of being and presenting oneself in the female world in the African context (Gomes 2019).
In this sense, despite the systematic work on the technical devices brought to light to understand the lexical, cultural, political and historical specificity of the materials in question, the translation process as understood by the team does not see translations as a hygienic, technical and ‘neutralising’ act. On the contrary, the richness that is intrinsic to it motivates us to position ourselves, to question ourselves and to question our own place in the intersections of the social field of knowledge production.
In the pages of this monograph, we depict intersectional analysis as a theoretical perspective with a strongly socio-anthropological focus (Crenshaw 1991; Andersen and Hill Collins 2001), in dialogue with dense cultural translation studies articulated in dimensions: that of authorial production and that of the texts’ subsequent reception. The intersectionality of dimensions such as race, ethnicity, gender and class, as well as their entanglements, allows us to investigate motives apparently external to the works that are in fact intrinsic to their existence in the discursive territories recognised as canonical.
Which bodies produced these records? How were they socially read in terms of race-ethnicity, gender, class, disability and sexuality? This corresponds to a critical reading of the context of production. Regarding the contexts of reception, the intersectional analysis also provides us with elements for the social diagnosis of our readers: how are the reading bodies to which our translations are addressed socially read in terms of race-ethnicity, gender, class, disability and sexualities? And then, what practices of epistemic justice can we activate so that they simultaneously affect our bibliographies, translations, quotation policies, public competitions and pedagogical practices in teaching, research and community projects?
During this research, we considered a heterogeneous set of sources, including primary sources such as correspondence, ephemera, field notebooks and photos. To access some of Hurston’s works, we consulted secondary sources, such as author biographies, essays and media news that are referenced when specific themes come to light. Encompassing the crossing of primary and secondary sources, this monograph is the result of a documentary ethnography in which it was decided to present a sequence of events of Hurston’s life divided into significant stages. These stages have privileged her life trajectory and struggles, her relationship with institutionalised anthropology, her artistic creations and her collaboration with the Black movement. This account has been driven from the present, and therefore it maintains a dialogue with contemporary discussions in global anthropology.
Throughout our writing, we aim to portray the production of Zora Neale Hurston’s biographical subjectivities and their particularities not only as universal knowledge, but rather as diasporic, dialogic cultural productions. Our construction was guided by contemporary anthropology itself and networks of other authors that are activated in our dialogue with Hurston by the existence of distinct ways of presenting her works.
The strength of Hurston’s writing reminds us of that of Black and Quilombola (Afro-Brazilian) authors, such as the historian Beatriz Nascimento, who develops her notion of aquilombamento as a practice of ontological, creative and existential resistance (Nascimento 1985), or Antonio Bispo (2015), who proposes the construction of counter-colonial pedagogies that make visible the intersubjective bodily experience of a collective that recognises itself as Black, Latin, Southern and non-white, and from this place affirms its existence in the world. As the Colombian scholar Orlando Fals Borda (2009) would state in his ethnographic description, we wrote this piece as a ‘feeling-thinking’ activity directed towards the society from which our knowledge grows – within local roots, directed into a global dialogue.